Ken Kauksi

Wow, this interview jumped constantly from one tangent to another! Ken admitted to me that he’s quite a shy guy and rarely does video calls, but as you’ll see, it turned out to be an amazing interview with an incredible guy.

What can I say about him? He’s clever, smart, really intelligent, and cares. He cares about others. Cares about the environment. Cares about being a responsible business.

Early Beginnings

Ken had a childhood eerily similar to mine: botting video games to make money. His was Runescrape, mine was Conquer Online (which he played too!) The idea for us was the same: “Why spend countless hours farming/hunting, when we could write code that does it for us?”. We both began programming and building bots for ourselves and others – all in our early teens.

He then shared another comment that resonated with me: “But, after viewing games as a means to make money, I lost interest in video games entirely. I regret that. I wish I would have just played them for the sake of enjoyment.” I too rarely play video games anymore, and I attest some of that because I burned out on their money-making potential.

From there, Ken learned to program more and eventually landed himself a job. And we mean “landing” literally . He was traveling for fun in Spain and came across a guy, and after a few short chats, he had a job offer. Out of the blue! Ken still works for this company and is currently the acting CTO, but he admits it’s not his long-term passion…

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Dark to Light

Ken’s big idea is to build a decentralized, crowdsourced, computing network. The idea is straightforward: most people in the world have a lot computing power sitting unused at any given time (a laptop sitting idle, a phone turned off, etc), so, why not allow those people to sell that computing power to people that need it? With the growth of AI, this has become a hot commodity!

But, he realized that he couldn’t jump to this ambitious effort right away. He shared advice to other budding entrepreneurs at this point: “Just start. Stop asking questions. Get something out there”. And that he did! Instead of building this decentralized network, he decided to start getting sales as soon as possible by selling proxies, just like we do at Rayobyte. Proxies have many use cases, with the most popular being data scraping.

When he started selling proxies, he ran into a common challenge proxy providers are faced with at all times: nefarious actors. Many people know proxies as botnets, hacking, malware, etc, and although that is true for the illegal yay-hoos out there, it is equally true that proxies can be used for many whitehat use cases that power the data we all consume as consumers. Have you ever used Google? Booking.com? Hotels.com? Yep – all of those are powered by data scraping, which requires proxies at scale!

Ken had a decision to make: should he sell to these unethical (and sometimes illegal) users, or, take a long-term view and work only with whitehat customers by adding a KYC (Know Your Customer) barrier to his purchase process? He chose the latter 💪, a value that Rayobyte shares with him.

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Business as a Force for Good

Ken’s long-term thinking doesn’t stop at proxy ethics. He shared with me that he killed his own crypto mining operation when he realized how terrible mining is for the environment, even though it was quite profitable for him. And then he discussed something even more near and dear to everyone at Rayobyte: the support of Ukraine in these terrible times.

Ken told me that he had another project that had 1% of its profit set aside for a charity donation. They hadn’t donated it at that point, and when the war broke out Ken asked his partner if they could donate to Ukraine. Ken had his reasons: his home in Estonia, a former USSR country, is 100km from the Russian border. If Russia were allowed to walk over one other country, there would be no stopping them from doing the same to other former USSR countries. We agree, which is why we’ve put considerable time and effort in supporting our team members in Ukraine.

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Conclusion

Taking the big picture view of it all, we see Ken as someone that really cares about making a difference in the world:

-Ethical proxy selling, even when there is more money in the gray area.
-Environmental consciousness.
-Supporting Ukraine in their fight against the Russian bullies.

What’s next for Ken? Well, he plans to keep running WTFProxy, while working on his decentralized crowd computing project on the side. But, it’s clear he’s not going to stop doing good any time soon, and we’ll be rooting for him all the way 🥳.

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