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px4311/04/20253 repliesview on HN

You know his dad ran research at the NSA right?

His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day.


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nostrademons11/04/2025

I talked to the son at one of the early (~2008) YC dinners. Actually found him more approachable than PG or most YC founders; RTM is a nerd in the "cares a whole lot about esoteric mathematics" way, which I found a refreshing change from the "take over the world" vibe that I got from a lot of the rest of YC.

Interesting random factoid: RTM's research in the early 2000s was on Chord [1], one of the earliest distributed hash tables. Chord inspired Kademlia [2], which later went on to power Limewire, Ethereum, and IPFS. So his research at MIT actually has had a bigger impact in terms of collected market cap than most YC startups have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

chihuahua11/04/2025

RTM Jr is a very nice person, obviously very smart, but also has a good sense of humor and is friendly and approachable. We overlapped as C.S. grad students at Harvard for several years.

NewsaHackO11/04/2025

I did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers.

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