News

Starcross technology news, including chronicle of events, company news, API international trends, trending technology, policies and regulations, opinions and comments, etc.

Exclusive Interview With Wang Yu—— 24, Living in His Persona

2022-06-17PV:171

Wang Yu, 24, started Starcross Technology a year and a half ago with his classmates, former CTF competition rivals and former work partners. During the past year and a half, the team of Starcross Technology has expanded to more than 50 people, and Wang Yu has also transformed from a CTF competition player to an entrepreneur.

In the interview, I asked him What’s his an ideal life. He said, "I want to have a house near the sea and wake up in the morning and find that someone has taken care of my work for me.” I was surprised that the 24-year-old boy has fully accepted the role of entrepreneur and didn’t have any uncomfortable like the other people assumed.







Wang Yu—— 24, Living in His Persona

By GaoNing



Wang Yu, the founder of Starcross Technology, keeps the hair style of guitar player



Strong Elf-esteem

Wang Yu describes his high school life:

“The last few mathematical problems of high school math test are usually difficult, but if you have learned a bit of advanced mathematical knowledge, things get easier. For example, a derivative problem, normally requires all kinds of derivation, calculus, but if you learn advanced mathematics, you can see at a glance -- 'This is a Taylor expansion'; Another example is three-dimensional geometry, but if you build a triple integral of a three-dimensional graph, and then solve the definite integral according to the original function, you can figure out the volume in a few seconds. I learned Kirchhoff's law for analyzing complex circuits when joule's law was the only requirement in school.



Wang Yu is quite smart, and he knew this since he was a student, he treated his excellent learning ability as “a preference for low-dimension strikes”. It was these experiences that gave him a strong, even paranoid self-esteem.



As a junior high school student, Wang Yu, at 1.65meters, weight 70 kg, finished second to last in the sports test of 1000 meters. With 70 people in the class, the classmates laugh at him “so fat, run slowly”, he felt “no, I am not”.



Since then, he invited his friends to run around the playground every evening, 5 kilometers a day. After a period, he felt running is not enough to improve his physical ability. So he began weight carrying race with school bags of 2 or 3kg, and do horizontal bar at playtime, abdominal muscle training after school. Through all these efforts, his weight down to 110, 1000 - meter run all second grade graduation test.



“In fact, I was also very playful when I was young, but I got good grades and never dropped below the top 5 in grade. I always thought I was excellent, so when I was frustrated by someone, I felt very painful and tried to change the situation.”



He did solve many problems in this way.



The most impressive one, the school punks intended to pick a fight with him, so he participated in combat training for half a semester, and his skills and physical strength have obviously improved. Next time, when the “Big Brother” came to find trouble, he slapped him twice, and those punks were scared, he ran after the “Big Brother”, until he gave up and apologized to him.



To some extent, this strong self-esteem guided his life.



During the school days, he learned the guitar and joined the band for similar reasons. Before the Mid-Autumn Festival party, he rehearsed until his hands were full of blood blisters. It may be precisely this kind of strong self-esteem that forced him to constantly seek solutions to problems and forced him to improve in a bitter way.



Draw development map

Wang Yu said that he was once obsessed with the stage, either because he learned to enjoy the spotlight and flowers during his band experience, or because he just loved the feeling of being in the spotlight.

This felling remained even after he became addicted to computers.



In Wang Yu’s opinion, the initial study of hacker technology was kind of rebellion to the closed learning model and. of course, the more direct reason is to get stolen game account back and learn to crack the Internet cafe billing system. So he spent a lot of time in the computer room of high school, and he found a more direct way to prove himself in the computer world .



There are many such examples, such as sneaking into empty computer room to crack the school’s monitoring system, getting rid of the teaching control machines in computer class, and winning the 5th place in the national information security attack and defense competition in senior high school.



Computers, or hacking, a skill that make him outstanding among his peers, opened up a whole new world for him.



Of course, the atrike also came quickly.



After he chose information security as his major, Chinese CTF competitions emerged one after another. He began to organize teams in school to participate in competitions, but found that professional knowledge did not play a role in the competition, he didn’t know how to attack and defend or infiltrate. In his first competition of the strange field of CTF, his team ranked 153rd in China. Then, Wang realized that real Internet security did not always exist in the classroom, so he decided to take a look outside in advance.



When she was a sophomore, Wang Yu worked as an intern in a security company, and he was paid 80 yuan a day, including meal subsidy. His page is only enough for commuting costs and lunch. The worst time, he took 5 yuan bought packed lunche downstairs in the company and ate at the roadside, such days have last for half a year.



After half a year, he was able to do some penetration projects independently, which has enhanced his technical foundation, and more importantly, it created the technical confidence of a CTF professional player.



Four years for sharpening a sword

In 2015, Wang got a live ticket of GeekPwn’s Geek carnival from a friend.





At that time, GeekPwn's technical level and competition style were quite representative in the thriving CTF competitions in China, but Wang Yu was not qualified to stand on the competition court at that time.

After watching the whole game, he thought, "Now that I have come here, I should to take a picture with the experts.” While his idols either refuse to take pictures or in a urgent to catch a plane. Wang Yu thought at that time, “They don’t want to take a picture with me because I’m unknown, and I have to find a way to get on stage.” later, those idols has became Wang Yu’s classmates and teachers at Tsinghua.

After this brief episode, he ended his internship in the security company and officially began his competition life.

After returning to school for postgraduate education. At that time, the Blue Lotus team formed by Professor Duan Haixin and Zhuge Jianwei just entered the final scene of DEFCON CTF, the world’s top CTF competition.

For Wang, the best choice was become a member Tsinghua University’s Cybersecurity lab, the birthplace of Blue Lotus.

He turned to many friends to find the contact information of the laboratory, ZhuGe JianWei gave him a test of listing 6 topics for CTF competition. At that time, Wang Yu's performance in the domestic competition was not bad, but it was not a small test to set questions for the international competition. After hanging up the phone for an hour, he had blood blisters on his mouth.

“There’s no use to worry, I’ll just face it.”

He asked several friends to plan and write the questions together, which were successfully applied to the competition. After the competition, the contestants gave high comments on the questions, so he was not interviewed and was directly admitted to the Network security laboratory of Tsinghua University.



After that, he became a member of the Blue Lotus team and participated in many competition.







2018 BCTF, from left, Wang Yu, ZhuGe JianWei, DaXiong, XiaoXi

In three years, “Blue Lotus” won various domestic and international competitions, Wang Yu also forged an indissoluble bond with these partners.

In 2018, he established Starcross Technology with his partners in the competition, including Xiao Xi, XingBO, network security entrepreneurship began to become his main work.

Despite his awards in so many competitions, Wang Yu still couldn’t make up for the regret of GeekPwn2015 four years ago.

In 2019, the technical advantages brought by practical experience made a good start for Starcross Technology entrepreneurship. In the high-intensity entrepreneurial work, CTF competition gradually ceased to be the main line of their work. At this moment, GeekPwn2019 sent the invitation to participate in the competition.

Wang Yu did not want to miss the chance to make up for his regret, so they submitted the title two hours before the deadline.

Although they have won many major championships, this tournament is not as smooth as expected.

They slept at 4 a.m. every night for two weeks, and two nights before the game, the bugs they’d worked on for two weeks were suddenly fixed by the manufacturer (the game was based on real network targets).

After a short period of desperation, they did not give up, and finally successfully found a “bypass” on the original loophole.

In the end, they won the GeekPwn2019 competition and Wang Yu was elected to the GeekPwn Hall of Fame.





Looking back now, it took Wang Yu 4 years to stand on the winner’s podium at GeekPwn from an unknown audience.



Do Something Big

“Civilization must be more barbaric than barbarism to defeat barbarism.”





In 2018, Wang Yu, Da Xiong, Xiao Xi, Xing Bo, Zhang Haoling, Li SiCong established Starcross Technology, but the facts prove that business and competition are completely different.

After seeing their proposal defeated by a competitor in a bidding contest, they went back to their office and wrote this sentence on the blackboard in anger.

In fact, they have better options than starting their own business. Competition, penetration testing, and security training programs have brought them considerable personal income. When it comes to why they started their own business, Wang Yu has a simple idea:

“We want to follow our hearts and do what we love to do, rather than go into a big company and be nobody.”

Over the past year and a half, Wang Yu has interviewed dozens of people as the founder of Starcross Technology. One of the most common questions she asks is: “Why do you want to join us?”

For himself, he never seemed to have had much of a struggle with the issue over the years, but he knew that Starcross Technology couldn’t go far without the same goal.

Earlier, Starcross Technology faced the risk of breaking its funding chain because many of its clients took longer to pay, and he believes the company grew in the same atmosphere and culture in which several members of the founding team invested their own money through works like digging holes and playing games.

Wang Yu has quickly entered into his role as an entrepreneur, different from the previous “obtain an object sought for”, entrepreneurship for him to solve those trivial “necessary things”.

On February 2, 2020, Wang Yu returned home from his hometown to Beijing. In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak in China, everyone was working from home, but he had to prepare to fly to the United States.





American time on February 24, the global top security conference RSAC will be held in San Francisco, Star diaphragm technology plans to attend the exhibition in 2021, so it is particularly important for Wang Yu to observe this exhibition.

What was more serious was that the entry quarantine of the important states and cities in the United States at that time was very strict, so he had to find another way.

On the taxi to the airport, while dealing with the local docking matters in the United States, he bought an air ticket from China to Seoul, then from Seoul to Hawaii, and finally from Hawaii to Los Angeles. After a journey of more than 30 hours, he arrived at the heart of the United States in a three-step jump attitude.

After the RSAC, he returned to China, but two days later, the news reported that two new coronavirus patients were diagnosed at the conference, and he was forced to stay at home for two weeks, thus delaying our interview plan for a time.

When I asked him if he was afraid, he said, "It's not a big problem. "

It's hard to compare the disruption of life with the disruption of work for young entrepreneurs, but the only certainty is that it forces them to fulfill this self-requirement.



The life dream of a 24-year-old CEO

In 2019, Starcross Technology raised the first round of money

A valuation of tens of millions of yuan is a good start for a start-up, but it is far from Wang Yu’s own ultimate goal.

In his expectation, Starcross Technology should develop in a different way extraordinary. As Wang Yu has the same tutors with the founders of CHAITIN TECH, Zhu Wenlei, Yang Kun, people often make comparison among them. In fact, Wang Yu often takes lessons from these big brother. Starcross Technology is now casting off survival pressure, and focusing on difficult issues like automated security testing and intelligent business security.

“Forward! Forward! Advance at all costs!” This quote from the Three-Body Problem inspired Wang Yu for a long time.

For Wang Yu, Starcross Technology is like the human battleship in the book, which must run forward with hope. He said he could not live without direction and hope, as he had tried to lie in bed all day and do nothing, loneliness and emptiness would suddenly envelop him. Perhaps the best way for him to get out of this kind of life dilemma is to always move on and always act his part well.

Download Center

Name

Phone Number

Email

Position

Industry

Company

Success!