How to Create an Open Web with Evan Chang

My guest today is Evan Cheng, co-founder & CEO of Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs is a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography experts whose founders led Meta’s Novi Research and helped develop the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The mission of Mysten Labs is to create foundational infrastructure for Web3. They partner with crucial ecosystem builders to make step-change improvements to their networks. Before co-founding Mysten Labs, Evan helped lead Novi Financial and was the research and development director. Evan focused on systems & security, programming language & formal verification, and new product experimentation as the Director of R&D at Novi Financial. Novi Financial is Meta’s crypto R&D division. Before leading Novi Financial, Evan worked at Facebook as the Director of Programming Languages and Runtime. Evan focused on supporting Facebook's world-class team in programming languages, runtimes, and compilers: Hack, HHVM, Skip, Flow, Python, Reactive programming, C++, LLVM, Android + iOS mobile runtimes and optimization pipelines, mobile JavaScript platform, and runtimes, Glow, and more. Evan worked at Apple for over a decade, where he was a third-level manager overseeing seven engineering teams. He focused on leading efforts in static and runtime compilation for both CPUs and GPUs, Swift performance, static and dynamic linker, shared cache optimizations, debugger, and bitcode tooling. He collaborated on HW transitioning plans, a simulation tool for early GPU architecture exploration, built & integrated tools, App Store tools, and security hardening. Evan Bootstrapped various new "engineering effectiveness" initiatives. In our conversation, we discussed multiple topics, including; Mysten Labs, the future of Web3, the infrastructure of Web3, decentralization, and much more. We began our conversation by discussing what attracted Evan to crypto and what compelled him to make the jump to start Mysten Labs with co-founders. Evan explains why we are at the precipice o