Dr. Leemon Baird is the inventor of the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm. He had been thinking about the problem of distributed consensus for many years. This was driven from a desire to be able to carve out your own piece of cyberspace, to share with those who you want to share with, and not have to be dependent on the whims of a big technology company to host your data or collaborations. As a mathematician and computer science PhD, Leemon looked at the problem and thought it was unsolvable for a long time, but kept coming back to it until he found the answer.