Apple, Google, Cash App alums ditch Big Tech to build on bitcoin

AUSTIN — On a Friday morning last spring, Mark Suman called out sick from his job as a senior engineering project manager at Apple and made his way downtown to a place called the Bitcoin Commons, a sort of clubhouse for enthusiasts of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, situated a few blocks south of the Texas State Capitol.

At the time, Suman was, in his words, “an active hobbyist,” tinkering with the technology in his spare time. “I actually played around with it a bit within Apple as well,” he says. “There’s not a lot I can say, other than we were always exploring new technologies, and so I was playing around with some of the open-source bitcoin tools within Apple and doing some exploratory work.”

Suman was there for the annual ‘Bitcoin Takeover’ event. He had followed many of the speakers online and when he saw the gathering pop up on his feed, he took the day off to see it for himself.

“I was sitting in the crowd wanting to get into the space and really build something new and build something novel,” Suman recalled.

What happened instead was the beginning of a professional pivot: he struck up a conversation with a developer after a talk at the Commons, and was introduced to other coders who were winding down a project called Mutiny. Within a few months, Suman handed in his notice at Apple and with the developers he’d met, pivoted into something bigger — co-founding Open Secret, a startup reimagining how user data is stored in the cloud. Instead of relying on centralized databases, the company encrypts data to each individual user — even after it’s uploaded. So if there’s a breach, there’s nothing to steal, Suman explained. No honeypot.

The leap was not without stakes.

“There are plenty of sleepless nights,” he said. “I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a kid off at university.”

He had spent years working on privacy infrastructure — tackling tough technical problems around user protection at scale — but saw a way to do it better with blockchain. “Apple likes to talk a big game about privacy,” he says. “And having been there, I’ve seen very deep within a lot of their systems that they do care about privacy at every level.”

That vision — and the Commons — helped give him conviction. The builders there were all laser focused on creating something that mattered.