Experts

Samson Burton is Co-Founder of pieFi, Co-Optimus at Upside Cooperative.

pieFi

Upside Cooperative

Samson Burton

Nick Tomaino is Founder and General Partner of 1confirmation. Formerly, Principal at Runa Capital, Business Development at Coinbase.

Nick Tomaino

Jalak Jobanputra is the Founding Partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund in NYC focused on next-generation technology such as blockchain and machine learning. FPV’s portfolio includes Abra, Open Garden, Blockstream, Bitpesa, FuseMachines, Everledger, and Blockchain. Jalak was awarded Institutional Investor’s Top Fintech Dealmakers of 2017 and 2016 and was also listed as a 100 Most Influential Fintech Leader of 2016 and 2017 based on her investment strategy at FPV. In 2017, she was cited as a “Top 5 Investor Powering the Blockchain Boom” and Crunchbase noted FPV as one of the top VC funds in blockchain “before it was cool”. In Spring 2018, Jalak received the Microsoft Top VC Trailblazer Award for her "valuable contribution to the blockchain community" and was appointed to the American Banker Advisory Board. Since founding the firm, she has spoken on blockchain technology, IoT, and artificial intelligence at many global conferences, including the Milken Global Institute, Dutch Development Bank/FMO annual meeting, and The Economist Buttonwood Gathering. Additionally, Jalak is the Founder of Collective Future, a global initiative to foster diversity, inclusion, and education in the blockchain sector.

Before founding Future\Perfect Ventures, Jobanputra was the Director of Mobile Investments at Omidyar Network, a philanthrocapitalist fund started by Pierre Omidyar, co-founder of eBay. While there, she created a mobile investment strategy, invested in an East African mobile tech incubator, invested in the fastest growing Indian mobile classified ad site, and closed Omidyar’s largest for-profit investment ($5M) to date in Latin America, a wireless company that created credit profiles on unbanked middle income consumers using mobile data.

Jobanputra was previously Senior Vice President at the New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF), a private economic development fund, where she managed the fund’s technology and digital media venture investments. While there, Jobanputra spearheaded the formation of NYCSeed in 2008, a seed fund dedicated to funding early stage tech entrepreneurs in NYC, in response to a market gap in seed funding at the time. She was also on the selection committee and served as a mentor and speaker for NYCSeedStart, NYC’s first summer accelerator program, and helped launch the FinTech Innovation Lab, which has since been replicated in London and Hong Kong. Jobanputra worked closely with the Bloomberg administration and NYCEDC to implement initiatives to help diversify the NYC economy through NYC’s growing tech/digital sectors and served on Governor Paterson’s Small Business Taskforce. Her portfolio at NYCIF included outside.in (acquired by AOL), Thumbplay (acquired by Clear Channel), Schoolnet (acquired by Pearson) and TXVia (acquired by Google), in addition a debt instrument to Grameen America, and seed investments in Magnetic, Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora), Enterproid (acquired by Google) and SeatGeek.

Prior to NYCIF, she was a Principal at New Venture Partners, a $300 million early stage venture fund that commercialized technology out of corporate labs. At NVP, she founded and served as interim CEO of Real Time Content (spun out of British Telecom) in 2005, a personalized video ad platform, and was a Director of Procelerate Technologies, a SaaS workflow management tool for the aerospace industry. She also incubated a range of other technologies, including speech recognition/NLP, 3D displays, video surveillance, 4G wireless broadband, and music recommendation software. From 1999-2003, Jobanputra was at Intel Capital in Silicon Valley, where she invested in enterprise software, internet and digital media startups, including Demantra (sold to Oracle), Extricity (sold to Peregrine), Viacore (sold to IBM), R Systems (IPO), Financial Engines (IPO), Yodlee (IPO) and Zinio. In 1997 in NYC, in the early days of Silicon Alley, she launched and managed product development for online financial information startup Horsesmouth. She began her career in media, telecom and tech investment banking at Lehman Brothers and Broadview in NYC and London.

Jalak Jobanputra

Sean Neville is Co-Founder of Circle. Investor, Board Director, Engineer. Formerly, Founder & CEO at Sevenchord, Sr Software Architect at Brightcove, Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems.

Sean Neville

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

After a long career at Sun Microsystems, where he became a Sun Fellow, Diffie served for two and a half years as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (2010–2012). He has also served as a visiting scholar (2009–2010) and affiliate (2010–2012) at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he is currently a consulting scholar.

Whitfield Diffie

Yoichi Hirai is Formal Verification of Ethereum Contracts.

Yoichi Hirai

Balaji S. Srinivasan is co-founder of Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. Formerly the CTO at Coinbase.

Prior to the Coinbase acquisition, Balaji took over as CEO of Earn's predecessor to help turn that company around. Before that, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, he was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award and was named to the MIT TR35.

Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.

Balaji Srinivasan

Blockchain nerd, Ethereal explorer, Mystic Mathematician. Part of the Consensys mesh. Creator and chief architect, uPort.

Christian Lundkvist

Peter Smith is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Blockchain, a financial technology and data company that has empowered millions of users across the globe to store and transact digital value quickly and without costly intermediaries. Under his leadership, Blockchain has become the market leader in digital currency and distributed ledger technology. By 2016, Blockchain’s software has powered over 100M transactions around the world.

Peter is a 2016 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and noted thought leader in the FinTech space, having been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, TechCrunch, and spoken at conferences around the world including Techcrunch Disrupt, Money 20/20, Web Summit, Collision, Wired Money, among many others.

Prior to co-founding Blockchain, Peter lived, studied, and worked in the US, Europe, MENA, East Africa, and Asia. When he isn’t basking in the glow of a laptop, you can find him either reading or out running, trekking, surfing, and climbing up or skiing down a mountain.

Peter Smith

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.

Samson Burton

Co-Founder of pieFi.

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