Experts

Andrew Quinn is Management Consultant at Slalom. Fortune 500 Strategy.

On a mission to make Web3 go mainstream. Writing about education, projects, products, and the beauty of decentralization.

Andrew Quinn

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.

In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin. At first, I was skeptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested. I started writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly initially at a meek wage of $1.5 per hour, and soon with Mihai Alisie cofounded Bitcoin Magazine.

In 2012, I entered the University of Waterloo; in 2013 I realized that crypto projects were taking up 30h/week of my time, so I dropped out. I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general - hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since.

Vitalik Buterin

Pavel Durov is the CEO and founder of Telegram, a messaging application that attracted over 60 million active users in less than 2 years since its start in 2013. Before that, Pavel founded VK – the most popular social network in Russia and some other countries with over 100 million active users. Pavel left Russia and VK in early 2014 to focus on developing Telegram.

Pavel Durov

I am a technology entrepreneur. I am an investor or advisor to companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish. I am a co-founder of Color Genomics. I was co-founder and CEO of Mixer Labs, which was acquired by Twitter. I was a VP at Twitter focused on scaling the company from 90 to 1500 people. I worked at Google, started their mobile team, and worked on AdSense.

Elad Gil

Michael Clear, a postdoc at Georgetown University, working with Adam O'Neill. Clear was well versed in economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networks. He said that "I'm not Satoshi, but even if I was I wouldn't tell you."

Michael Clear

Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor.He first gained attention for innovations in banking and startup finance. Today he is known as the mentor of the PayPal mafia of entrepreneurs, as well as for his warnings of a coming technology deficit with severe economic consequences. He works to accelerate innovation to prevent such a crisis by identifying and funding promising technology ideas and by guiding successful companies to scale and dominate their industries.

In 1998,Thiel made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding and leading PayPal, which now has more than 128 million active financial accounts. In 2002, he sold PayPal to eBay and founded a global macro fund, Clarium.In 2004, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, which offers platforms for finance companies and intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to integrate, visualize, and analyze the world’s information.

In the same year, he made the first outside investment in Facebook, a social networking hub that now has more than a billion million active members. He serves on its board.

Building on his personal success as a venture capital investor, Thiel co-founded and manages Founders Fund, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital fund that has pioneered new methods of venture financing that benefit founders. Through Founders Fund, as well as through his private investing, he has helped the next generation of tech companies, such as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, RoboteX, and Spotify.

And in 2012 he co-founded Mithril Capital Management, an international technology investment fund.Thiel established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which promotes freedom in all its forms. He sponsors the Committee to Protect Journalists, The Seasteading Institute, and the Human Rights Foundation. He funds the artificial intelligence research of theMachine Intelligence Research Institute.

He also aids work against violence through theOslo Freedom Forum and through the research of philosopher René Girard, which is extended and promulgated by Imitatio. He also promotes better health by funding the longevity research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and the SENS Research Foundation.Thiel created the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which nurtures the tech visionaries of tomorrow. And he formed Breakout Labs to help independent scientists, engineers, and inventors advance their most radical ideas.

Thiel earned a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and technology and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution.

His articles have appeared in Policy Review and the Wall Street Journal. He co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, was rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, and received the Innovation Award from the Economist in 2010. He lives in San Francisco.

Peter Thiel

Widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash, he is also known for other fundamental innovations in cryptography, including privacy technology and secure election systems.

David Chaum

Tuur Demeester is the Editor-in-Chief at Adamant Research, which focuses on macro investment opportunities in the Bitcoin and blockchain space. He is an early investor in Bitcoin, and is a regular speaker at Bitcoin conferences around the world. He also cofounded the Belgian Rothboard Institute, an academic think-tank.

Tuur Demeester

The cofounder of Stellar Development Foundation. Learn about his work with Stellar.org and his background in the technology space.

Jed McCaleb

Chris Dixon is a general partner. For the past five years, Chris has been an active seed and venture-stage investor at Andreessen Horowitz.

Previously, Chris was the cofounder and CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011.
Chris has been a prolific seed investor, cofounding Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, and making a number of personal angel investments in various technology companies.

Chris started programming as a kid, and was a professional programmer after college at the high-speed options trading firm, Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard.

Andrew Quinn

Management Consultant at Slalom. Fortune 500 Strategy.

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