Alyse Killeen, Managing Partner StillMark Co She is a Venture Capital Investor with seed stage to pre-IPO investment experience in enterprise and consumer technologies, now. Stillmark Co is a venture capital investment and advisory firm. Alyse is a member of the Satoshi Roundtable, an annual retreat for the top 50 thought leaders in blockchain technology, and in 2015, the UN Foundation named her a Top 70 Bay Area Digital Leader. An international speaker on blockchain, sharing economy, and IoT, Alyse has presented at events including the IMF SKBI Conference 2016 and TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2015. Featured in publications including Forbes and Bloomberg, in 2015 Alyse authored a book chapter in the award-winning Handbook of Digital Currency. Alyse is a Mentor at Plug and Play Tech Center Accelerator and the Alchemist Accelerator, and a member of New York Fashion Tech Lab’s Expert Network. She is a Venture Partner at Vinetta Project, the largest organization serving women founders, and a member of the Board of Directors at BitGive, a startup NGO modernizing the nonprofit ecosystem using blockchain technology.
Alessandro Voto , West Coast Regional Director Consensys, a Brooklyn-based blockchain technology venture studio, and a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future. Alessandro connects organizations and social entrepreneurs with the San Francisco Bay Area blockchain community to build decentralized applications and services. His focus lies at the intersection of economic design, peer-to-peer technology, and social change.
Jonathan Levi, Creator HACERA, The Most Significant Bits. Jonathan is a technical entrepreneur, visionary and pioneer in the field of complex quantitative, financial and transactional systems. Jonathan is keen on getting innovative and early-stage ideas, as complex as they may be, from theory, paper or the research lab – to production. Jonathan moved from the City of London to the Silicon Valley back in 2012, to complete a computational mathematics graduate degree at Stanford University. He got accepted to the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Ignite program for entrepreneurs, got his venture idea accepted to GSB’s Venture Studio (incubator) and left to pursue it through The Most Significant Bits. Merely a few months after working on some of the security aspects of the open source project Hyperledger Fabric, he got elected by the developer community to become one of the project’s maintainers. Prior to this, Jonathan created HACERA. HACERA is the world’s first fully-auditable and cryptographically secure framework for distributed governance. It combines secure authentication, authorization and accounting/auditing services, with the ability to preserve participants’ privacy, protect sensitive and confidential data while still being able to hold counter-parties liable to digitally signed commitments. HACERA allows participants and organizations to deploy very complex solutions involving sensitive data, and align with their identity- and access-control requirements, to seamlessly support cross-enterprise transactional applications, without requiring a trusted third party (a “middle-man”). Jonathan has a unique combination of skills, being an applied cryptographer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist who has worked as a quantitative strategist in the financial services industry in both London & New York. He brings extensive “hands-on” financial trading and vast field experience in designing, building and deploying to production complex quantitative systems meeting the high demands and workloads of Standard and Poor’s, Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs. Prior to that time, he worked for the Israeli Defense Forces on mission critical, military grade cryptographic systems with zero error tolerance, and at Cisco Systems (Network Management Technology Group, Secure Access Control Server) on FIPS-140-2 certification of the crypto code base to meet the strict National Security Agency security requirements.
Duncan Davidson, CoFounder/Managing Partner Bullpen Capital, the pioneer of Post Seed investing, an early A round setting up a super-sized round. Previously he was at VantagePoint Venture Partners, a mega-fund and one of the leaders in CleanTech. Prior to joining the dark side, he started or was involved with four startups: Covad and InterTrust, both multi-billion dollar IPOs in the ‘90s; SkyPilot, an outdoor WiFi mesh, and Xumii, one of the earliest mobile social networks. At Bullpen he is focusing on future technologies like AI, drones, IOT; as well as startups digitizing analog businesses. He is on the board of Illumeo, Verbling, Filament, Sourceeasy, Lumoid, and DoubleDutch, and an active advisor to Wag Walking, Betable and Twenty20.
Kyle DuPont ,CEO/Founder Ohalo in London. Ohalo uses a private implementation of the Ethereum protocol to manage access to and provenance of data across entire ecosystems of data assets. This enables business to more easily access data by allowing compliance teams to understand how that data is moving. Kyle has been coding for years and developed the distributed systems architecture and smart contracts for Ohalo with his team, including colleagues that actually wrote some of the Solidity language.
Before founding Ohalo, Kyle was a Fellow and Entrepreneur in Residence at Anthemis Group, one of the premier fintech investors in Europe. He has been in the blockchain space since 2012 when he co-founded his first startup in the Bitcoin space. Previous to that he was working in finance mainly out of Tokyo for companies like MUFG Morgan Stanley.
MODERATOR: Pierre-R. Wolff, Managing Director ExecConnect, a firm facilitating professional transactional connections. His clients include firms in global financial services and corporate venture capital interested in executing corporate development transactions (specifically investments, M&A, and strategic partnerships), and early stage companies in need of business/corporate development and fundraising strategy assistance. Over the past 3 years he has spent a significant amount of time in the Blockchain ecosystems consulting on various transactions. Pierre currently serves on several advisory boards of blockchain, 3D printing, collaborative communications, real-time streaming and payment system companies. He received his MBA from EDHEC in Nice, France, and conducted his undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.
