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.
Interviews
Duncan Davidson, CoFounder/Managing Partner Bullpen Capital #smartcontracts
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.
Alessandro Voto , West Coast Regional Director Consensys #smartcontracts
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.
Michael Gilroy, Canaan Partners NYC #svversusnycfintechvc
Michael Gilroy, Principal Canaan Partners. Michael invests in entrepreneurs building enterprise software and fintech companies. He is interested in talking to founders building the next generation enterprise tools and fintechs solving the structural issues in finance. Deeply passionate about building the entrepreneurial community in fintech, Michael launched Canaan’s FinTech Central in 2015, a quarterly event series covering trends in fintech. Previously, Michael advised technology companies with GCA Savvian and Matrix Capital. He received a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.