Odaily's exclusive interview with Boundless: This group of tech enthusiasts is elevating ZK to a culture and philosophy.

Original | Odaily Daily Report

Author|jk

The cold winds of Colorado carry the aspirations of the blockchain world, and at the surrounding events of ETH Denver, a stamp modeled after a string of red berries is being pressed onto the arms of every attendee—this is the first token left for participants by the Boundless team. Reka, the brand and communications director, stands beside the installation, lightly running her fingers over the surface of the berry stamp: “Berry is a very interesting homophonic pun, with each one representing the combination of Boundless and Verifiable Compute.”

Berry has clearly ignited the enthusiasm of the Boundless community members, and now over 1.5 million NFTs themed around it have been minted. Under the reflection of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the distance, Odaily engaged in a series of in-depth conversations with six core members of the Boundless team behind "Berry"—CEO Jeremy Bruestle, Head of Technical Products Jacob Everly, Chief Information Officer Shiv Shankar, Chief Operating Officer Joe Restivo, Vice President of Product Brett Carter, and brand steward Reka Medvecz. From the engineering philosophy of ZKVM to the trust game of TEE, from revolutionary experiments in AI reasoning to the brand narrative behind "Berry", the company's technological ambitions and humanistic touch are equally astounding.

The high-fidelity conference wristband, the first bucket of gold with a strong sense of theft.

At the ETH Denver conference in early 2022, a group of uncredentialed young people stood outside the venue, clutching fabric and tools bought from Joann Fabrics (a local print shop). They compared the style of the attendees' wristbands, cutting, sewing, and repeatedly practicing the motion of raising their hands to get through security. When their imitation wristbands successfully fooled the checks, this group perhaps did not realize that this "rule-breaking" hacker-style breakthrough would become a metaphor for the company's fate.

“The early investments we later secured were all negotiated at this ‘mixed-in’ conference.” Boundless CEO Jeremy Bruestle recalled. For a company with security as its technological core, this almost absurd starting point resonates with the underlying logic of the blockchain world: those who break old rules often define new rules first.

The "epiphany moment" in a math paper sparked a virtual machine revolution

As one of the co-founders of the company, Jeremy's obsession with mathematics is like an undercurrent that connects Boundless's technological genes. When I asked him whether the founding of Boundless came from a sudden moment of inspiration or was the result of long-term accumulation and preparation, he replied without hesitation, "It is a gradual process."

Five or six years ago, someone who could take reading mathematical papers as a hobby read in a paper about the PCP theorem (Probabilistically Checkable Proofs): "Any complex computation can be verified in constant time." In other words, no matter how long it takes to complete a computation, we can instantly prove its correctness. This discovery is like an electric current passing through the brain — if humanity could instantly verify the truth of everything in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the trust mechanism of blockchain would be completely subverted.

But the technological reality at that time was cold and harsh: the verification took far longer than the computation itself, with the theory being perfect and flawless, but the engineering was at a standstill. It wasn't until 2020 that the paper on the STARK proof system gave him a glimpse of hope. "I did a simple calculation and found that as long as the engineering is optimized, the verification speed of ZK can be improved by a million times."

In the late-night phone call, he excitedly described his vision to his partner Frank, only to encounter a soul-searching question: "But how will developers program it?" When Jeremy threw out "finite field polynomial constraints," there was silence on the other end of the line. "No one would be willing to write this kind of thing; it's completely useless!" Frank's cold water woke him up from the bubble of technical idealism.

The real turning point came in San Francisco. That night, Jeremy, Frank and Brian, three men, stared at an empty beer can and suddenly had an idea: "What if we could emulate an existing computer in ZK?" ”

The idea, later known as ZKVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine), has completely changed the game. They chose to be compatible with the RISC-V instruction set—like cloning a standard computer in the crypto world, developers write programs using regular Rust and Solidity code, and the virtual machine automatically generates ZK proofs. "We want to make ZK as natural as using electricity; developers just need to screw in the light bulb without having to understand the principles of electricity generation," Jeremy metaphorically stated.

The industry initially scoffed. Jeremy's views at that time were indeed radical; "The virtual machine is relatively inefficient" "Developers should learn the underlying circuits, there's no need for zkVM" - doubts flooded in like a tide. But the Boundless team understood: when Japanese convenience stores take over street tea shops with standardized processes, the power of a compatible ecosystem will always outweigh local efficiency.

In 2023, the release of the RISC-V ZKVM is like a boulder thrown into the lake. Four or five latecomers quickly followed suit, proving that the market had finally read the judgment of RISC Zero at the time: when ZK meets a standardized instruction set, the speed of technology adoption will exponentially explode.

But Jeremy's gaze has shifted further away. "ZKVM is just allowing developers to write code; we need to make it 'power on'." The team that has now released Boundless is packaging ZK as the infrastructure of blockchain—just like cloud computing turns servers into on-demand resources. When developers can invoke ZK to accelerate on-chain computations with just three lines of code, this revolution that began with a mathematical paper will truly reach the world it aims to change.

! Odaily Interview with Boundless: This group of tech nerds elevate ZK to culture and philosophy

Boundless CEO Jeremy, a person who treats mathematical papers as a hobby.

What is Boundless?

On the exquisitely designed official website of Boundless, there is a phrase: **"We're building Boundless, the first universal ZK protocol that brings the power of zero-knowledge proofs to all chains. (**我们正在建造 Boundless，首个将会把零知识证明的能力带到所有区块链的 ZK 应用。） But what exactly is Boundless? What is its relationship with its parent company RISC Zero——a top-tier project that raised 40 million dollars in funding in 2023?

From RISC Zero to Boundless: From zkVM to Modular ZK Computing Network

In the blockchain industry, RISC Zero is a highly recognized name, serving as a leader in zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) and occupying an important position in the ZK computing field. However, Boundless is not just a continuation of RISC Zero, but rather a more generalized decentralized computing protocol.

"RISC Zero is the underlying computing engine driving Boundless, and Boundless is the way developers use RISC Zero technology on-chain." explained Boundless CIO Shiv Shankar.

Looking back a few years, discussions around ZK computing were mainly focused on how to improve speed, trying to narrow the performance gap between ZK computing and traditional computing. Later, RISC Zero took an entirely new path: using zkVM (instead of traditional circuit-level optimization) to enhance the efficiency of ZK computing. This breakthrough brought greater flexibility, allowing ZK computing to move away from fixed circuit designs and come closer to traditional computing architectures, truly achieving general-purpose computing.

However, merely having zkVM is not enough, as developers not only need computing power, but also a complete toolchain, an end-to-end developer experience, and a viable economic model.

"This is exactly the purpose of Boundless," Shiv said. "It not only provides high-performance ZK computing but also simplifies the process for developers to integrate ZK technology, allowing them to focus on their applications without worrying about the underlying computational details. They can easily use ZK computing regardless of which chain their applications run on."

Boundless = RISC Zero + complete protocol stack + economic incentives.

From the Trident Project to the Challenges of Boundless: Finding the Optimal Solution through Practice

"We hope to build the right solutions from the very beginning." Boundless CEO Jeremy Bruestle recalls the early stages of the team. This goal sounds straightforward, but the challenges to truly achieve it are far more complex than one might imagine.

Before the birth of Boundless, the team did not blindly follow the popular solutions on the market, but instead conducted a large-scale technological exploration experiment - Project Trident.

At the time, there were very different views within the team on how to build the ZK computing market. **Some people believe that from the perspective of Layer 1 (L1), we should build a ZK computing public chain optimized from the bottom up; Others believe that Layer 2 (L2) is a more realistic path that can be implemented more quickly; There are also advocates of a hybrid architecture with scalable ZK computation at different levels, other attempts by different factions, and so on. **

In many companies, decisions about the technology roadmap are often made by the founders or executives, while Boundless has chosen a more challenging path: developing three different prototypes simultaneously, testing their feasibility in practice, and ultimately determining the direction based on data and results.

"In the end, the winning solution was neither the CEO's nor the Product Owner's,** but the proposal of our senior engineers." ** Boundless CIO Shiv Shankar said.

This process not only found the best technical solution, but also established a culture of boundlessness: not blindly obeying authority, and letting the best ideas prevail. "Boundless will have a large community of developers in the future, and we want the great ideas from community members to be respected and embraced in the same way as the ideas of our internal teams," says Shiv. If someone has suggestions for where Boundless is headed, we want them to see the story and understand that their ideas won't go unnoticed, but will be taken seriously, just as we do with our own. ”**

"The Native Rollup Execution Layer of Ethereum": Boundless's Core Achievement

If one concept could summarize Boundless's positioning in the blockchain ecosystem, it is the "Ethereum-native Rollup (Native Rollup) modular execution layer (Modular Execution Layer)."

Product Vice President Brett Carter defines Boundless as "the native modular execution layer of Ethereum," a positioning that implies a paradigm shift in blockchain architecture. Just as cloud computing disassembles data centers into different layers, Boundless is splitting ZK proofs into pluggable components:

• ZK Mining Market: Drawing on the competitive mechanism of Bitcoin PoW, but replacing hash collisions with proof generation to eliminate energy waste.
• Verification as a Service: Just like AWS Lambda abstracts server management, developers do not need to build their own verification nodes.
• Cross-Chain Execution Layer: Similar to how the HTTP protocol unifies internet communication, Boundless becomes a ZK co-processor shared by multiple chains.

"If you study Justin Drake's discussion on native Rollup at the Ethereum Research Forum, you will find that Ethereum needs a decentralized network focused on execution (Execution-Only) to enhance computational capacity, and Boundless is the best solution for this need," said Brett Carter.

Jacob Everly, the head of technology products, told me that the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Singapore has developed a prototype system using the technology of RISC Zero and Boundless, which can verify whether traders in the Asia-Pacific region can trade on the Singapore Exchange without having to provide complete personal information. Users only need to upload their passport and mobile number to generate a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) that proves their eligibility to trade.

Currently, more than 30 teams are planning to build and deploy applications on Boundless. "Our goal is to reach 100 partner teams next year, making Boundless the industry standard," Jacob Everly said.

340x Optimization: How to Reduce ZK Computing Costs to an Affordable Range?

If finding the right architecture is the first hurdle to Boundless, making it truly commercially viable is an even bigger challenge. ZK computing not only needs to be fast enough, but it also needs to be cheap enough, otherwise it will only stay in the lab and will not be able to become the core infrastructure of the Web3 ecosystem.

Boundless Vice President of Products Brett Carter, when I asked him what the biggest challenge was, immediately gave an answer: “Historically, our biggest challenge has always been performance and cost.”

In ZK calculations, latency and cost are not always synchronized. Theoretically, latency can be reduced by parallelizing the computation, but this drives up costs. For Layer 2, if the cost of ZK computation is too high, then the economic model of the Rollup scheme will be difficult to establish, let alone scale up.

In July 2023, Boundless launched Zeth, the world's first Type 1 ZK EVM, which operates on Boundless's ZKVM. Estimates at the time indicated that to prove all transactions on the Ethereum mainnet, the annual computational cost would reach 170 million dollars. This cost is enough to deter most projects.

But in just 16 months, Boundless managed to reduce ZK compute costs by a factor of 340 through a series of GPU compute optimizations, ZKVM core optimizations, and architecture-level improvements, bringing the cost of proofs to less than $500,000 on the Ethereum mainnet. "Behind this is a lot of technical optimization, especially at the GPU level, we have continuously optimized ZKVM and GPU cores, so that this cost can be greatly reduced." Speaking of this achievement, Brett's eyes are full of pride.

TEE and ZKVM: When "Verifiability" Meets "Programmability"

In terms of calculating trustworthiness, TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and ZK (Zero-Knowledge Proof) are often seen as two competing solutions, but Boundless has demonstrated that they can complement each other, much like the combination of local computing and cloud computing, each leveraging its strengths to optimize the overall system.

TEEs are responsible for performing computations in a trusted environment, but their proof data is often too large to be placed directly on the blockchain. ZK, on the other hand, efficiently verifies the correctness of calculations on-chain by generating verifiable mathematical proofs. **Brett Carter, VP of Product, reveals the economic value of this collaboration with a bill: in the case of Automata, it takes 6 million gas to directly verify TEE proofs on Ethereum, but with ZKVM, the computation part can be executed off-chain first, and only ZK proofs need to be verified on-chain, and the gas cost is reduced to 300,000, achieving an order of magnitude optimization. Taiko has supported both TEE and ZK proofs in its rollup scheme, indicating that blockchain computing will be more flexible in the future, and developers can choose the best trusted computing solution according to their scenarios.

This also provides many projects using TEE services in the DeFAI field with an additional possibility: The AI field is accustomed to outsourcing inference tasks to centralized services, such as OpenAI or Google Cloud, but users are actually unable to verify whether these models are operating as intended. In other words, if ChatGPT commits wrongdoing at the model level, users will have no recourse. Verifiable inference through ZK will be a very valuable application scenario.

Boundless's ZKVM now supports AI computation, and since the trial operation in July 2024, performance has improved by 50-100 times. This means that AI computation can be executed directly within the ZKVM and generate verifiable ZK proofs, ensuring that inference is based on the correct model weights and cannot be tampered with.

Why ZK? Why are we still talking about ZK?

In the history of science and technology, every transformative technology has gone through a similar trajectory: from the germination of the concept, to the frenzy of the market, to the trough of disillusionment, and finally to the stage of mature application. Today, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKs) are going through such an inflection point – they were once touted as the ultimate solution to blockchain scalability, but in practice, the engineering challenges far exceeded expectations and market sentiment fluctuated. However, Boundless CEO Jeremy Bruestle believes in the future of ZK and believes it is at a critical juncture in the computing paradigm.

"From the perspective of the technology hype cycle, we are currently in the trough of disillusionment stage." Jeremy explained. "Many people saw the potential of ZK a few years ago, believing it could quickly change the blockchain computing model, but they underestimated the engineering difficulties of moving from theory to practical implementation."

Nevertheless, the progress of ZK technology has been astonishing. "In the past few years, the performance of ZK computing has increased by 3 to 4 times every quarter. This means that ZK, which could not be applied on a large scale a year ago, has now begun to enter a practically usable stage."

This is exactly why Boundless was born. ZK is not just an emerging technology, but a computing paradigm that is maturing. Jeremy even compared it to the microprocessor revolution of the 1970s: "At that time, most computing tasks on the market were handled by custom circuits (ASICs), and the emergence of microprocessors was not optimistic. But with advancements in technology, they became faster and cheaper, ultimately replacing all dedicated hardware. ZK computing is on the same path - it will break through the current blockchain computing bottlenecks, making scalable and low-cost computing the standard."

Breakthrough the dilemma of "Raspberry Pi on the blockchain"

What stage is the current blockchain computing environment in? Boundless CIO Shiv Shankar provided a vivid analogy: "Today's blockchain computing power is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi. Computing resources are extremely limited, application developers have to work hard to optimize Gas costs to accommodate the performance limitations on the chain."

Currently, executing a highly complex smart contract calculation on traditional blockchains may consume billions of Gas, equivalent to the computational load of 30 blocks, making it impossible to complete on the mainnet. This is akin to the internet bubble period in 1999, where people paid exorbitant bills for dial-up internet yet had to wait half a minute to load a single image. The changes brought by ZK are like the arrival of the broadband era—when Boundless compresses on-chain computing costs by 90%, the blockchain finally has a chance to break free from the shackles of Gas.

In the past 12 months, blockchain users paid $5 billion in gas fees, but the actual computational capacity was extremely limited. After ZK computing matures, the same computational cost will bring a 10-fold or even 20-fold increase in computing power, leading to an exponential growth in the industry's 'economic output'. "We are creating 'resilient cloud computing for blockchain', allowing computational resources to scale on demand like AWS cloud servers, with prices that are almost negligible," Shankar explained.

How will ZK computing change blockchains in the next five years?

If we were to make a bold prediction about the development of ZK in the next five years, Jeremy believes that ZK will gradually replace the consensus-based execution model and become the mainstream method of blockchain computing.

The technical tipping point for this shift may come sooner than expected. The "proof market" system that Boundless and other teams are breaking through is actually replicating the evolutionary logic of the cloud computing market - **When ZK computing power becomes a commodity that can be standardized and traded, price wars and performance competitions will give birth to more sophisticated proof aggregators, more efficient hardware acceleration schemes, and more intelligent resource scheduling algorithms. **At that time, the "GDP" growth curve of blockchain may repeat the steep climb of the Internet from dial-up to broadband.

The core of this silent revolution has always adhered to the ancient rules of the computer industry: truly great technology never asks the world to adapt to it, but rather becomes a part of the world itself. The computational liberation movement can only be considered truly victorious when developers stop discussing ZK itself and instead focus on building on-chain applications that were previously unimaginable.

Jeremy is at the ETHDenver conference.

Competitive Landscape: When Efficiency Takes a Backseat, Security and Usability Take Center Stage

The history of blockchain always repeats the same cycle: when new technologies emerge, countless "solutions" flood the market, each claiming to be the future standard, all competing for attention. But when the technology enters a true implementation phase, the market quickly filters out those that only appear to be glamorous bubbles, leaving behind the architectures that truly possess long-term value. In this competition, Boundless is standing out in an unprecedented way.

If the ZK computing market is an emerging city, then most projects are busy constructing high-rise buildings, hoping to attract residents with their shining appearances. However, Boundless has chosen the path of building roads, optimizing water and electricity supply, and creating infrastructure that can truly operate sustainably for the long term.

"True decentralization, from the very beginning, means censorship resistance, means establishing a real market mechanism that minimizes proof costs while ensuring a genuinely secure virtual machine (VM)." Boundless CEO Jeremy Bruestle bluntly stated that many ZK computing solutions may seem flawless in the early market stage, but the real test only comes after large-scale adoption.

Imagine that a DeFi protocol processes thousands of complex transactions per day, and suddenly finds that the cost of ZK computing is out of budget, or the system is too decentralized to resist regulatory pressure, no matter how advanced the technology is, such a solution will not become the cornerstone of the industry. **Boundless' solution to the problem is to ensure that the use of computing resources is transparent and fair through the Verifiable Proof of Work. **

This innovative mechanism ensures that the rewards received by Provers** are entirely based on the amount of computational work they actually complete, effectively preventing brush attacks, and at the same time subsidizing the cost of proofs, so that the operating expenses of the entire system can be reduced to a reasonable range. In other words, Boundless isn't hyping the "future of ZK computing", it's making ZK computing truly available, scalable, and affordable.

From "Rental Computing" to "Complete Solutions": One-stop ZK Computing Experience

Many projects view the ZK computing market as a "computation exchange," where developers purchase computing power to generate proofs, much like renting servers on a cloud service platform. However, Boundless's approach is completely different — it not only provides computing power but also offers an end-to-end ZK computing experience.

"We don't just sell computing resources to users, we provide a complete ZK computing solution that allows developers to seamlessly integrate ZK into their applications." Boundless CIO Shiv Shankar explains.

In other words, Boundless doesn't want to be a "cloud provider" in the Web3 era, but rather a "ZK computing partner" for developers. From proof generation to final on-chain verification, Boundless makes the entire process seamless. This kind of experience optimization is the key to truly moving ZK computing from the lab to large-scale applications.

For developers, this end-to-end design means lower technical barriers, faster integration, and a more stable operating environment. Boundless makes ZK computing not just a sophisticated technical concept, but a productivity tool that can be implemented directly.

Product-Market Fit: When the cost of calculation approaches zero, real competition is just beginning.

"By 2026, hardly anyone will talk about the performance issues of ZK computing." Shiv Shankar told me.

The breakthrough in computing technology ultimately revolves around one fundamental issue: cost. Whether it is cloud computing, GPU rendering, or AI training, the true tipping point of the industry has never been the breakthrough of performance limits, but rather the reduction of computing costs.

Shiv's judgment sounds incredible, but if we look back at the path of cloud computing, the trend couldn't be more obvious. **Today, few engineers care about the exact compute cost of AWS EC 2 because the price has dropped to negligible levels, and developers are only concerned about how to make better use of these resources. **

The Boundless team believes that ZK computing is about to enter the same stage. This means that developers will no longer be preoccupied with "how fast ZK computing is" but will start thinking about how to utilize it to create safer, more efficient, and more scalable applications. DeFi, identity verification, on-chain games, data privacy protection... the application scenarios of ZK will witness a true explosion, and Boundless is at the forefront of this transformation.

Currently, the main demand for ZK computation comes from Rollups, Layer 2, and application scenarios that require the verification of State Transition Functions. For example, EigenLayer plans to use Boundless technology in the Slashing Mechanism, because executing these computations on Ethereum requires 1 billion Gas, but ZK computation can complete the calculations off-chain and efficiently submit proofs, making it a feasible solution.

But now, ZK computing will not only optimize existing Web3 applications, but also enable a whole new set of blockchain applications. **Boundless is currently working with a DeFi team that wants to build Data Markets, which involves several pricing models. In the past, they could only run approximate computations on-chain due to the amount of computation, but Boundless allows them to run the model in its entirety and submit ZK proofs for more accurate DeFi transactions. **

"If you start building DeFi applications today and don't use ZK technology in your system, you're quickly becoming obsolete from the industry." Shiv's statement sounds radical, but it is exactly what it is: by 2026, the use of ZK computing will be the default option, not the privilege of high-end technology. When developers stop being crazy about gas budgets, innovation will switch from "survival mode" to "creative mode".

In the future, DeFi applications will no longer be limited to the Web3 circle, but will be able to compete directly with TradFi (traditional finance) and even large exchanges. They will have stronger privacy protection, lower transaction costs, and higher execution efficiency. And Boundless is paving the way for the arrival of this day.

Mainnet Launch: Boundless's "Moon Landing Plan"

"We are sprinting towards the Mainnet at full speed, and ideally, we expect to launch the mainnet in early Q2 to Q3 this year." Shiv Shankar told me. The current top priority for Boundless is undoubtedly the deployment of the mainnet. Over the past few months, the team has conducted multiple rounds of experiments on the testnet to validate the protocol's stability, computational performance, and economic model. Now, everything is entering the final sprint phase.

Before the final mainnet launch, Boundless's next milestone is "Mainnet Beta," a trial operation phase aimed at developers.

In the current testnet environment, the proofs of ZK computation are operational, but they are not fully in the real economy. The goal of the Mainnet Beta is for developers to start generating ZK proofs in a real funding environment to test how the system will perform under real-world market conditions.

"After the Mainnet Beta, we will focus on the extensive testing of Incentive Mechanism," Joe Restivo revealed.

This will be a key stage in the implementation of the Boundless economic model, where the team will test and refine Verifiable Work to ensure that the allocation of computing resources and the incentive system will work efficiently in a decentralized environment.

Decentralized Governance: Establishing a Community-Driven ZK Ecosystem

In parallel with the mainnet, there is also a plan for decentralized governance (DG, Decentralized Governance).

Shiv Shankar bluntly said that Boundless not only wants to build an efficient ZK computing platform, but also wants to truly make the community a part of the ecosystem.

"The launch time of decentralized governance depends more on the legal and operations teams rather than the control of the engineering team." This means that although Boundless has provided technical support for the ZK computing market, the final decision-making power will gradually be handed over to the community, truly achieving decentralized operation.

Boundless's ultimate plan: to push the limits of blockchain computing

Brett Carter, VP of Product, told me that his core point is that all computational executions will eventually be migrated to zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) for a simple reason: under the current blockchain architecture, all computations must reach consensus across all nodes, which physically limits the throughput of the entire network. For example, Ethereum's gas cap per block is only 36 million, a limit that means smart contracts can't perform high-complexity calculations like AI inference, or the entire network will be paralyzed.

If today's blockchain computation is similar to synchronous programming, then the ZK computation provided by Boundless is more like Asynchronous Computing - developers can perform computations in parallel off-chain, prove their correctness through ZK, and finally submit only small proofs to the settlement layer, without having to complete the entire computation process on-chain.

When Ethereum L2 blossoms everywhere, the real bottleneck has shifted from the network layer to the computing layer - whoever can drive the "heavy trucks" such as AI training and 3D rendering on the blockchain highway will have the passport to the next era. That's why we've named the protocol Boundless — to remove the boundaries of computation and make the blockchain truly infinite in computing power, says Brett. In the future, blockchains will no longer be just tools for transactions and smart contract execution, but will be able to support more complex applications, such as Verifiable AI Inference, high-performance on-chain games, decentralized social networks, and more. Boundless' vision is to enable blockchain computing to fundamentally break free from current performance constraints and achieve true computational freedom.

Conclusion: Behind a Shirt is a Non-Standardized Philosophy of Innovation

At the end of the interview, Chief Operating Officer Joe Restivo mumbled at me, his words full of resentment: "You know what, we have a very big challenge at work: Jeremy has a 'special' shirt with a Japanese tsunami pattern that he wears every time he goes on stage instead of our company's official merchandise. Every time he wears that tsunami shirt on stage, I want to rush over and put a Boundless official POLO shirt on him."

Jeremy's Lucky Shirt: Ukiyo-e Style Waves

I specifically asked Jeremy this question again. In the face of doubts, he generously admitted: "I do often wear that shirt with the tsunami pattern. Especially when meeting investors or giving speeches, I basically always wear it." This subtle conflict between personal aesthetics and the company's brand unexpectedly became a footnote to the team culture: At Boundless, the team is creating value in a way they like. Or, expressed in a more Ukiyo-e style, in the wave of technology, what is more important than going with the flow is finding one's own wave.

"There are so many people in the world, if everyone is doing the same thing, then the possibilities of this world will be limited." He told me, "It symbolizes a philosophy... I have always believed that each of us can freely choose what we want to create. The most meaningful thing is to create something that best represents 'ourselves'. No matter whether it ultimately succeeds or not, we will always persist in creating."