How to Actually Get Hired

Steve Kim grew up in South Korea and moved to the US at his father's advice to study economics. His father was involved in South Korean politics, and political philosophy shaped Steve's intellectual formation early: he minored in political philosophy at Penn State University alongside his BA in Economics. His route into blockchain was philosophical before it was technical. He encountered Bitcoin through Austrian economics and the work of Friedrich Hayek: the concept of decentralization as a check on monetary monopoly resonated before the technology did. He taught himself the technical side of blockchain through sustained self-study, which he describes in his own words as "endless efforts" to acquire knowledge without a computer science background. The result of that unusual combination, economic theory plus political philosophy plus self-taught blockchain protocol knowledge, is a researcher who can interpret protocol design and governance through frameworks that most crypto-native engineers lack. His first industry role came when John, who would later become CEO of A41, read Steve's public research writing on Solana and Luna in 2020 and sent him a direct message to recruit him. A41 was a blockchain venture capital fund at the time. Steve joined as an investment analyst and eventually became Co-Founder and Research Lead, building the research function that gave A41 its industry reputation. In 2023, he co-founded Four Pillars with two partners from KAIST and Seoul National University respectively, starting with $0.5M from Kakao Ventures, Hashed, and Bass Investment. Three years later, the firm has 600+ research reports, 100+ protocol partnerships, and a Series A from Pantera Capital. Academic and intellectual work: Steve's research writing is his primary intellectual output. Four Pillars publishes constantly: rapid comment pieces on protocol developments within hours of announcements, monthly EIP analysis, multi-author flagship reports on stablecoins, RWA tokenization, and infrastructure trends. His own byline appears on research across L1/L2 infrastructure, Ethereum's roadmap, and consumer blockchain applications. He co-authored the December 2025 flagship report on the macro blockchain landscape with Jay and Heechang. He also wrote the Sui ecosystem report in October 2025. His GRTiQ Podcast interview (October 2024, Episode 192) is the best single primary source for understanding his intellectual development: he discusses Austrian economics, Hayek, the philosophical underpinnings of decentralization, and how those frames shaped his approach to blockchain research. It is an unusual conversation for a blockchain founder, and it is worth listening to in full before reaching out.

Heechang Kang is the operational and strategic co-founder of Four Pillars. Looked at in sequence, his career reveals a single pattern: he consistently finds ways to make complex systems legible and scalable, whether those systems are short-term rental markets, military signal intelligence operations, blockchain data infrastructure, or institutional stablecoin policy. Before founding Four Pillars, he ran JJ Residence, an Airbnb management business covering 18 rooms across four locations in Seoul, growing monthly revenue from $2,000 to $30,000 within eight months while maintaining a 50% net profit margin. That was built while he was still a student, alongside neuroscience research and preparations for mandatory military service. He then completed his South Korean military service in the Signal Research Lab, serving simultaneously as backend software engineer and senior interpreter for monthly seminars with foreign military agencies, facilitating more than 70 meetings alongside co-researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and KAIST. Being the person who owns the technical infrastructure and also facilitates the intellectual exchange between Korean and foreign researchers is a specific kind of dual fluency. It is exactly what Four Pillars is now being asked to do at institutional scale. After military service, he co-founded SOLVER (a peer-help marketplace), built an NFT marketplace for ARTUDENT using ThirdWeb and Nftify, and spent six months at Xangle.io, a Korean blockchain data platform, before co-founding Four Pillars in June 2023. The Xangle period is the most revealing. He built a cryptocurrency industry taxonomy across 7 categories and 40 sub-categories, devised on-chain metrics per industry, developed a crypto base price methodology pulling from 20+ exchanges, and built an Event Dashboard using Python and the ChatGPT API that consolidated key posts from 160+ projects and reduced the required workforce from 10 people to 2. He eliminated 80% of the headcount through tooling in six months. That instinct, find the bottleneck, build the system, remove the labour, came directly with him into Four Pillars.What he talks about publicly: Heechang's public presence at Four Pillars is concentrated on stablecoins and Asian institutional blockchain adoption. His board seat at the Asia Stablecoin Alliance, joined June 2025, signals he is the co-founder most directly engaged in the regulatory and institutional dimension of blockchain across Asia. That mandate maps directly onto FP Institution, Four Pillars' new third pillar bridging TradFi and blockchain through advisory and seminars. He is the co-founder who will execute it.