Yorke E. Rhodes III

Yorke E. Rhodes III is Co-Founder of Blockchain at Microsoft. Blend of CTO, CMO and Creative Innovator. Yorke is the Co-Founder of Microsoft Blockchain and a professor at New York University. He is a passionate technologist with broad interests, always drawn to the next new shiny object. He earned a BS in Computer Science from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He has worked in industry for over 20 years, in software across large enterprises such as Microsoft and IBM as well as startups in wireless, mobile, digital marketing and ecommerce. He had a short stint on the client side at Goldman Sachs Investment Bank building their first wireless internet ingress and advising bankers in wireless, telecom and media. His perspectives are informed by his experiences as a young software developer where he witnessed the beginnings of client server databases, the OS/2 demise, clamshell laptops, obscure languages like ada, lisp and paradox and the birth of the internet as we know it today. While ignoring bitcoin for many years, his interest was piqued by blockchain during the summer of 2015 with the launch of ethereum. He is currently on his second tour at Microsoft working Azure Blockchain Engineering and on partner and corporate strategy around blockchain and looking at various levers to help mature and accelerate this exciting nascent industry. Yorke is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU in the Masters of Integrated Marketing & Leadership programs where he has taught Digital Marketing, Ecommerce and Intrapreneurship and is currently developing a course on the user centric economy called #OurNextEconomy.