Sangyoon

About Me

Singapore, where I lived during high school.

Hello, I’m Daniel. Some call me Sangyoon. I was born in the States, but spent most of my life in South Korea and Singapore. I came back to the U.S. for college where I graduated from NYU Stern with a BS in finance.

After interning at a couple of investment funds in college, I moved to the bay area and did a startup where I 1) arbitraged inefficient markets in crypto and 2) made a crypto price-tracker and wiki platform.

That startup was both an early foray into the crypto world and a late entry to the the programming world for me. I then went on to do venture and crypto investments for Tim Draper at Draper Associates. I am now working on a new startup, this time as a full-time programmer.

Good old days learning from Tim

Personally, I try to play a few minutes of piano every day, and enjoy golf.

Code Projects

CryptoPanda

Task: A cryptocurrency price tracker built for my 2-day MVP project in Hack Reactor. Built using Coingecko's API.

Build: React, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Express.

You can view the site below, but note that "Comments" section does not work because github-pages (how this is deployed) does not allow hosting of database.

Backend System Design

Task: Built a backend API that could scale to web server level. Achieved 3000 requests / second and sub 50ms latency.

Learnings: Using secondary indexes to optimize table lookup speeds from O(N) to O(logN), horizontally scaling servers with a load balancer and using a ELT process to load millions of lines of csv data into my table schema. Limitations were having to use free-tier t2 micro instances on AWS.

The trickiest part was deploying, since there are so many finnicky parts in dev ops.

Build: NGINX, AWS EC2, PostgreSQL, loader.io (deployed testing) and k6 (local testing).

Project ECOM (Front-end)

Task: Ecommerce website built following detailed client specs. Built with three other engineers in agile sprint environment. I made the "related products" section.

Learnings: Using promise.all to make concurrent API calls, using local storage for storing user styles, and more CSS!

Build: React, Express, Node.js, Amazon EC2.

Battleship game

The classic Battleship game. Made with python.

Monty Hall Brain Teaser

Wrote the Monty Hall problem in python. Simulated it 10,000x to show that what seems like a 50/50 decision is actually 2/3 in favor of switching doors.

NASA Instagram

Display the daily NASA post from their API in Instagram format. Updates every day to new post automatically. Made with React.

TripSplit App

Made front-end site for project. Made with HTML, CSS and media queries to be fully responsive on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Investments

Arbitraging Mt. Gox Bitcoin Claims

Assessing a special situations opportunity in crypto.

How To Intelligently Invest in Crypto as a Retail Investor (from a VC)

Don't be a speculator. Be an investor.

I go over two big wins and try to illuminate the process behind finding winners early.

Reflection On My 2020 Investments - Bitcoin, Baidu, Cross-Harbour Holdings, and Cinemark

This is a recap of my largest concentrated positions in my personal portfolio, and how they have performed

I like having a concentrated portfolio. My biggest holdings through 2020 were Bitcoin, Baidu, Cross-Harbour Holdings, and Cinemark.

Fundamentally Valuing Uniswap

Valuing the top decentralized exchange

Here is how I valued Uniswap. My analysis here is conservative because I haven't accounted for the utility value of tokens, but only the cash flow potential.

Fundamentally Valuing Maker DAO

Valuing the iconic stablecoin

Here is the framework I used to value the MKR tokens.

A Stock Trading Below Net Cash Balance — Cross-Harbour Holdings (0032: HK)

Extremely undervalued sum-of-the-parts play with a large margin of safety, trading below net cash & investments

Investment Thesis: The company is currently trading at a massive 30% discount to the value of its net cash and investment portfolio. By buying at the current price you effectively 1) own the current net cash position at 70 cents on the dollar, and 2) get its operating businesses for free, all of which generate stable free cash flow.

Valuing the Next Billion Dollar Search Engine - DuckDuckGo

How DuckDuckGo has room to grow into a $1B+ valuation despite Google

I predict at least a 5x gain, and up to 30x increase from its rumored valuation of $160M in late 2018. I want to emphasize that DDG does not have to become the next Google — this investment is suitable for a series B or C investment for a good risk adjusted return.

Fundamentally Valuing Bitcoin at $75,000 / BTC

A framework to value BTC for the fundamental investor

I claim that: 1) Bitcoin has negligible intrinsic value without mainstream use as a transactional currency, 2) that despite this, Bitcoin can still hold value based on a different valuation model, 3) a valuation of Bitcoin, and 4) how a cryptocurrency like Facebook’s Libra affects Bitcoin’s valuation.

Piano

Contact

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';