Experts

Dariya Khojasteh, Building cults at Layer3.

Layer3

Dariya Khojasteh

Utopia Labs

Jimmy Song is Bitcoin Educator, Developer and Entrepreneur. Instructor at Programming Blockchain.

Jimmy Song

Co-Founder and CTO of NEAR Protocol. Team of ex-MemSQL / Google / Tensorflow. Now building sharded mobile-first blockchain protocol.

Artificial Intelligence Researcher. Making this world better with software and data. Passionate about Machine Intelligence, understanding natural language.

Illia is an ICPC finalist and has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and a manager of the team building question answering capabilities for the core Google search.

Illia Polosukhin

Casey K. Caruso is Investment Partner at Paradigm. Engineer, BS Computer Science, MS Machine Learning. Building Search Google. Investing in crypto.

Her main interests are technology and social pyschology. She is a transparent, bold, and reflective person.

Casey Caruso

Founder of Parity Technologies. Blockchain bloke. All things Web 3.0. London.

Gavin Wood is the founder of Parity Technologies, which develops cutting-edge blockchain applications. Most notably, Wood was one of the co-founders of Ethereum, having coded its first functional implementation. He is also the co-founder of Grid Singularity, which aims to develop a decentralized energy management platform.

Gavin Wood

Matt Odell is the co-founder of Final Message, Bitcoin Citadel. Advisor of Bottle Pay. He is also co-founder of CoinPrices, a site that delivers news and analysis on cryptocurrencies.

Matt Odell

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

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a best-selling author, speaker, educator, and one of the world’s foremost bitcoin and open blockchain experts. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdote, and historical precedent effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world.

In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin (O’Reilly Media), widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, The Internet of Money, unveiled the “why” of bitcoin—and became a bestseller on Amazon— and led to the wildly successful follow-up The Internet of Money Volume Two. His fourth book, Mastering Ethereum (O’Reilly Media) will be available in December of 2018.

He is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia, serves on the Oversight Committee for the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and has appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world, including the Australian Senate Banking Committee and the Canadian Senate Commerce, Banking and Finance Committee.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

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

As an entrepreneur, inventor, and investor, Gary Kremen has over twenty five years of experience with emerging growth companies and developing breakthrough technology.

He is founder of several Silicon Valley companies.  In 1993, he founded Match.Com the world’s largest dating company where he came up with he idea of online dating, wrote the original business plan, invested the original capital, lead the design of the product and hired the first 20 employees.  Kremen also founded Clean Power Finance (backed by Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures), the leading residential solar power financing platform company which over one third of all solar installers in the U.S. run their business upon.  He co-founded, with Ben Dubin, Full Source Software and Los Altos Technologies, early Internet firms.  Gary incubated, was the first outside board member and wrote the first check in Dolores Labs (now Crowdflower), the leading crowdsourcing company.

He is an investor in over 50 companies including such clean technology companies as HydroNovation, Watersmart Software (where he is the Chairman), Sunlink, Carbon Flow, Recurve, Greenbox (acquired by Silver Springs Network), Enmetric, Ready Solar (acquired by Sun Edision), Solar Universe, Lifefactory, People Power Co., Niman Ranch, and Marone Bio Innovations.
Gary is the primary inventor of the seminal U.S. patent for dynamically created web pages, patent #5,706,434 as well as patents #7,698,210 and #7,890,436.  He holds an MBA from Stanford University as well as degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Northwestern University.

Dariya Khojasteh

Building cults at Layer3.