Vijay Boyapati

Born and raised in Australia, Vijay Boyapati moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue a PhD in Computer Science. Instead of enrolling in a doctoral program, Boyapati ended up at a small startup called Google where he spent several years using his background in machine learning to improve the ranking algorithms used in Google News. Boyapati left his lucrative job in 2007 to work on a grassroots campaign in the 2008 Presidential election, helping to raise millions of dollars and bring hundreds of volunteers to New Hampshire to canvass for Ron Paul. In 2011, Boyapati discovered Bitcoin and went down the proverbial rabbit hole in a quest to understand how a new form of Internet money, backed by no commodity and guaranteed by no government, could have any economic value.