Emin Gün Sirer - Cornell Professor & Founder of AVA Labs Ep #10

**SPEAKER_1** (0:06)
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Now, on to the show.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:30)
Hey folks, this is Anatoly from Solana, and this is the No Sharding Podcast.
And today with me, I have Emin Gün Sirer, or I think Gün, right? As you like to be called.

**Emin Gün Sirer** (0:41)
Yeah, people who know me should call me Gün. People I've met should call me Gün.
All the messages that come in, Dear Emin, they go to Sven.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:49)
Okay, so can I switch from sending you messages with Dear Emin to Gün?

**Emin Gün Sirer** (0:55)
Yeah, you should. You'll get way more responses that way.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:58)
Awesome, okay, cool.
Yeah, the people that know me call me Toli, because I think Anatoly is kind of a long name for Americans. It's like, okay, fine, let's shorten it.

**Emin Gün Sirer** (1:11)
Yeah, it's a good trick.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (1:13)
Cool, so you're a professor from Cornell. You've been working on operating systems, distributed systems, probably as long as I've been programming, I think.
And it's super exciting to have you here, because I've been working on operating systems since I graduated college in 2003 That was really what I spent 10 years working on at Qualcomm. And there's just so much, so many engineering problems. It's a never-ending problem, right? People are, I feel like, are still gonna be building these things 100 years from now.
So it's a really cool technology to be working on. So do you wanna give a brief background and what you've been up to? How did you get into this space?

**Emin Gün Sirer** (1:58)
Sure, let's see, maybe a brief background on my background is simply that I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. I was always a super geeky kid, and I discovered computers when I was, you know, at the ripe age of like, what, 13, 14, maybe 15
14 or 15, it was pretty late. And personal computers were just coming online. They seemed amazing. I thought, whoa, I could really automate a lot of things that I see people doing by hand. And like most people, I was drawn to AI initially, and I got a very nice scholarship from Princeton. And so I left Istanbul to go and attend school there. And I took some cognitive science courses. I looked around and I thought, you know, AI is really cool and all, but we actually don't know how to build stuff that works. We just don't. And so I thought, okay, you know, like there are some technologies that are well understood, programming languages, you know, that's fairly well understood. It seemed that way at the time.
A bunch of other things that are very well understood. I've built my own compiler. I've done a bunch of things. I'd never been able to write my own operating system. It was just complex, right? So I thought, you know, I'm going to go to grad school, and I'm going to learn how to build operating systems.
And this AI thing will have to wait. We really have to get our infrastructure right. And every year since then, and this was a long, long time ago, every year since then, my choices have been validated. I think we still don't know how to build basic systems that work. Just look around. The most stuff is flaky. It works only because there's a crap ton of people who are concentrated on making it work.
The large-scale distributed services, very hard to get going, as you well know, very hard to keep up.
So blockchains are kind of exciting for that purpose alone. I think they are resilient in a way that most other services are not. In any case, what I did was I went on to the University of Washington to get my degree. That was the hotbed of OS building activity, UW and MIT. I didn't get into MIT. So we competed against the MIT approach on how to build extensible operating systems. And so...

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (4:32)
What year was this that you were building an extensible OS?

**Emin Gün Sirer** (4:36)
Oh, it was 1993 So, yeah, this was a system called SPIN.
Back then, the difficulty was, you know, everybody wanted operating systems to do something different, something interesting, something cool, not the basic stuff. But it's a little hard to change the OS, right?