HARRY KINGDON

I am a 28 y/o entrepreneur from London with experience across tech startups and media.

My current project is Tonk, a seed-stage startup doing R&D towards a decentralised web. Our focus is frontier cryptography & peer-to-peer systems, including zero-knowledge proofs, local-first software, decentralised key management and blockchain.

Tonk pushed the envelope across social, finance, gaming, developer tooling and more:

• We were one of the first teams in the world to build ZK state channels (you can think of this as a special high-perfomance blockchain).
• We built a social canvas that used verifiable external web activity as an gatekeeping mechanism.
• We built advanced developer tooling for state propagation across decentralised environments.
• We built a vibe-coding stack that gives creators and users maximum control of their data and applications.

Other progress includes raising $3.5m from best-in-class US investors, assembling a crack team from Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, Airbnb and leading peer-to-peer projects, and establishing advisory relationships with key figures at Anthropic, Google, Meta, the art-tech world and more.

I tend to play the "producer" role in most teams - a generalist with communication, operational & commercial skills who's literate in most things (or can build basic literacy fast). I help get things started, assemble talent and capital, and keep things moving at a strong pace.

Past projects

• On day one of COVID lockdown I started a food delivery service (before Gorillas existed). We grew into a hospitality platform and partnered with nationwide chains.
• When my friends and I were getting depressed about the climate crisis, I cofounded a multimedia climate publication. We were featured in The Telegraph and published writers from The Guardian, gal-dem and Vice.
• As a product manager I supervised a global rollout of Fortnite's child safety features. We built humane safeguards for the world's biggest games, at the frontier of tech regulation & identity infrastructure.

People who inspire me

• My dad is a legend in the marketing world. He's been subconsciously training my intuition for media and marketing since I was in nappies.
• My mum is the smoothest operator in the world. She can solve pretty much any problem and never loses her cool.
• I read philosophy at Cambridge and topped my year in logic. Sparring with professors in those seminar rooms gave me a clarity of thought that helps me make decisions and win support for them at speed.
• While I was at Cambridge an elite ballerina taught me to dance; we went on to compete at a national level.
• I've somehow ended up in the orbit of people shaping the next era of media. They've taught me a huge amount about creativity, grit and authenticity.
• Working at Epic Games during their battles with tech giants taught me that you can create & capture more value by growing the pie instead of taking a bigger slice.
• I play a supporting role in the UK's most promising innovation ecosystems - across funds, policy, entrepreneurship and academia. I'm an advocate of the builder ecosystems at Oxford, Cambridge & Imperial, and I recommend Entrepreneurs First to anyone looking for a cofounder fast.

I will always be a theatre kid, craving the rush of a captive audience. Thankfully I get to speak at conferences from Paris to San Francisco. The theatre kid lives on.