I’m Husam Abboud - some call me Hus, some call me Sam. (I can tell where you know me from by how you call me.) Syrian roots, Brazilian canopy, in San Francisco to build. Med school first, then a decade helping companies cross borders, now founder of Entity.ID.
LinkedIn serves the nice MBTI label; everything a professional page can hold is on projects. This page is for what doesn’t fit.
… Is it my Phoenician/Canaanite explorers and traders’ roots, my childhood references surrounded by a family of academics and entrepreneurs, or my innate curiosity and obsessive personality - which I both cherish and struggle with - that have compelled me to dig my barefoot toes into the sands of so many disciplines, from medicine to legal, to engineering, and academia - intellectually
same as in life physically, i call them arcs every few years I pick one thing and take it to the end - gold medals in Jiu-Jitsu, professional skydiving, marathons.. a mixology finalist in my own robotics automated house/bar that became one of São Paulo’s best-known. I don’t dabble; I finish arcs, then start the next one. The current arc is the largest: giving entities - human and non-human - a way to exist and be trusted independent of any state.
i’ve been told often that i’m working on systems most people think are impossible or unnecessary, usually both.. we have this saying in Portuguese maluco saca maluco, something like only crazy enough will get (understand) the crazy enough.. :)
I dream of my kids one day asking: “Father, what were borders? What were countries?”
What I believe
- Borders are the anomaly. For most of history there were none. If we all woke up tomorrow with no memory of countries, we would not recreate them. I call the destination the Supercontinent - and I’m building infrastructure for it.
- Entities are the sole engine of every advance society has made (entity = constituent + constitution): ventures, companies, orgs, agents, even church and state - all legal fictions, bottlenecked at the jurisdiction while operating globally. Give people the free ability to form them, and you change who gets to build.
- I don’t believe in neutrality; every system embeds values. I prefer to make mine explicit.
- I don’t believe trust comes from narratives or branding. I believe it comes from structure, incentives, and behavior, and while it remains a prerequisite to most transactions, we do have the tools to build trust-neutral social fabric, and we need it
- Maybe I’m not religious; I do have faith.
- Ars longa, vita brevis. The work outlasts the maker. Build accordingly.
Where that comes from
Earlier in my life, I built civil society platforms that grew faster than was safe, we grew to just under 300k members before Facebook and social media, eventually colliding with state power in very real ways1. It cost me nineteen years of persecution - forbidden from returning to Syria. That experience left me allergic to naive idealism and deeply interested in how power actually moves, not how we wish it did.
I’ve founded communities, protocols, and institutions, some of which grew fast enough to attract governments, prisons, and unintended consequences. Some took on a life of their own, and I’ve learned more from what broke than what worked.
Syria taught me the price of walls; Brazil taught me the joy of crossing them barefoot.
15 minutes of fame
…in my case, arrives now and then, fifteen minutes at a time, usually with a nickname attached. At seventeen our brotherhood community held a ceremony in my honor; I was already in another country, so I gave the speech from abroad (a first back then, and a big deal) to hundreds of people gathered, and my mother accepted the trophy. She still has it - fair, she did the harder part. In med school, a new professor opened her first lecture with ten minutes on one exam paper: the only full score, the one that surprised her. Then she said my name. I have been chasing that feeling since - haha.
The nicknames rotate. The ‘flag guy’, after the first demonstration of the revolution. The 2018 villain, the ‘Bitcoin Gold hack guy’, after I published The Realistic Lucrative Case of Ethereum Classic Attack and watched the model used within months against Bitcoin Gold, MonaCoin, Ethereum Classic, ZenCash, Verge and Litecoin Cash - millions in losses; other people drove the trucks. Lately, the robot guy, after a robot walked a bride down the aisle - 1M plays. Fifteen minutes each.
Beyond work - life arcs
- 🥋 3× 🏅 South American Jiu-Jitsu Champion (CBJJE)
- 🪂 Cat-C Professional Skydiver
- 🍹 Mixologist & Bartender (finalist in several intl. cocktail competitions)
- 🍺 Brewer, 🥃 Distiller, and 🍵 Fermentation Specialist
- 🏃♂️ Marathon Runner, Advanced calisthenics, gymnastic and acro
- 🤿 Advanced Open Water Diver 20yrs, 🧘 Yoga Practitioner & TM Sidhi,
- 🎶 Flute Beginner
Where to find me
I publish in waves - visuals on Instagram, thoughts on X, essays on Medium, code on GitHub, the record on LinkedIn, talks on YouTube. The full story is on life; events and press on Talks & press.
Footnotes
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and i was lucky - my closest friend spent their youth in prison then :/ ↩