Alex Bessonov, Founder/CEO BitClave Alex is a Senior Engineering Leader and Executive with over 20 years of experience in the Software and Security Industry. Prior to founding BitClave, a blockchain startup, Alex has served as the Founder and General Manager at whiteCryption, a security and cryptography-oriented company. Alex led whiteCryption to millions of dollars of revenue, while at the same time amassing numerous Fortune 500 clients. More recently, Alex has served as the Chief Security Officer at LG Electronics, overseeing all product lines as well as heading a large effort to remodel and centralize the company’s security team. In the past,
Jack Saba, CoFounder Day One Investments and Day One Consulting to aid international economic development by bringing the Blockchain to emerging markets. Day One Investments is an emerging Seed and Series A fund that is sector agnostic and Blockchain specific. At Draper University, he worked with over 200 entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries as they navigated business development, leadership, and fundraising challenges.
Sean Bennett, CoFounder/CTO Stronghold, an institutional asset management platform for cryptographic assets. Sean is an experienced software engineer with an extensive background in crypto. Having starting experimenting with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2011, he would later go on to build and operate a regulations-compliant service in New Zealand for users to store and move USD and other fiat currencies on distributed ledger technologies such as Stellar. Before joining Stronghold, as CTO of LINCD, he architected and managed the execution of commercial blockchain and smart contract implementations across multiple crypto protocols in the financial services and supply chain & logistics industries.
Chance Du, Founding Partner Coefficient Ventures, a crypto fund targeting in investing in blockchain ecosystem. Prior to start Coefficient, Chance has been an early stage investor since 2015. Companies she has invested in including GrubMarket (Plan to IPO in 2018), Scaled Inference(Co-invest with Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Data Collective , Protocol labs(Filecoin, Raised 250M in ICO), Atrium(Twitch founder Justin Kan’s new company, co-invest with Founders fund, NEA). She is an advisor for Sudo Review, KCH partners, IW ventures. Prior to being a venture capitalist, Chance was a founder of The One Inc.(acquired in 2015.)
Larry Li, Managing Partner Amino Capital Larry founded Amino Capital (Formerly known as zPark Capital) in 2012, and he also co-founded TEEC Angel Fund in 2010 (portfolio including ZOOM). His passion is helping entrepreneurs build disruptive products in big data, consumer electronics, drones, enterprise services and et.al. He led investment on fast growing companies, such as Human Longevity Inc., Ozlo, Orah4i, Assemblage (acquired by Cisco – NYSE: CSCO), Orbeus (acquired by Amazon – NYSE: AMZN), Skycatch, and Trustlook among over 100 early stage startups. Larry got his B.E degree from Tsinghua University and M.E degree at University of Florida. Being a successful investor Larry has also been actively giving back to the societies, contributing to many nonprofit communities. He is a board member of UCAHP, a founding contributor of Tsinghua 100 Education Fund, Vice Chairman of TEEC North America, and Vice President of Tsinghua Business School Alumni Association at US West. Larry is a frequent speaker at international investment conferences, and mentor for Stanford incubator programs.
Brendan Wales, Principal e.ventures Brendan joined e.ventures in March of 2012 and specializes in investing in online marketplaces, fin-tech, developer tools and open source software. He has worked on e.ventures’ investments in Shipt, CodeFights, AppDiff, StackShare, Segment, App Annie, Acorns, When I Work, Shutl (Acquired by ebay), Everything But The House, Spothero, Nativo and HireAthena and is also actively involved with existing investments NGINX, Upsight, and Housecall. As a part of the e.ventures’ team that leverages big data for deal origination, Brendan has been closely involved in the firm’s development and utilization of in-house technology built to discover growing internet enabled companies. Prior to joining e.ventures, Brendan was an early employee at 500 Startups backed ZOZI, a leading SAAS booking platform for Tour and Activity Providers. He started his career at Sun Life Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company, and has also started two consumer internet start-ups. Brendan earned a B.A. in Finance from the University of Georgia
MODERATOR: Daniel Cawrey, CoFounder/CEO Pactum Capital, a firm helping cryptocurrency stakeholders manage risk. He was previously a Contributing Editor for CoinDesk, the largest news resource for the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry.
