In June 2000, when Kan was 24, he formed a distributed search engine known as InfraSearch.com with Steve Waterhouse and another friend.
Kan was relatively well known in internet circles for a testimony he gave in July 2000 at the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age".
[2] Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Sony CEO Fred Ehrlich, and others also gave testimony at the hearing.
In his account, as the United States Senate decides the fate of companies like Napster, he stressed that "technology moves forward and leaves the stragglers behind," and that "the adopters always win, and the stalwarts always lose".
Prior to taking his life, Kan updated an electronic copy of his resume hosted on a University of California, Berkeley server to read "Summary: Sad example of a human being.