Our Founding Members

After earning a combined degree in classical piano and mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, Josh spent two years in isolation learning to program, while executing software projects of increasing complexity, eventually moving to New York City where he spent the next several years consulting with startups to help them reach potential. In 2016, Josh joined Google as a performance engineer, where he had significant impact on the performance of several well known Google applications, then transitioning to work on Google Assistant where he facilitated internationalization of the product into French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Hindu.

After leaving Google, Josh spent two years visiting over 30 countries, where he continued to consult for US-based clients. In this time, he has led a team developing an algorithm to predict concussions in professional athletes based on cerebral blood flow, performed patent analysis which provided evidence for a multimillion dollar award on a patent infringement case, integrated an international team into the development of an application responsible for distributing emergency financial aid to university students in urgent need of funding, as well as privately coached numerous students and professionals into effectively doubling their income by substantially increasing their market value in under twelve months.

At present, Josh is focused on growing the team across the globe, currently working with team members from Serbia, Ghana, Bulgaria, Singapore, Germany, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and Taiwan, working with a network of over 100 engineers, as well as many more similarly talented professionals.

While earning a BS in Finance from Penn State University, Ryan’s focus on alternative asset markets led to a study of fine wine as an investment, which led him to pursue learning opportunities through wine cellar planning and collection management.

Along with other young entrepreneurs, Ryan formed a creative company to develop and design websites and produce business applications for online platforms and marketplaces.

As a founder of Courtier, Ryan’s role as an Advisor and Technology Manager supports both the sourcing and sales teams, allowing him to work with all of the company’s suppliers and clients across many areas of the business.

Ryan enjoys spending time with his wife, dog, playing and listening to music, technology, sports, investing, trading, and wine.

Michael is one of the founders and CEO of Unit.Ventures, focused on creating meaningful jobs and solving inequity. It connects providers and customers, as well as allows businesses and individuals to issue tokens for specific uses. He is focused on social impact and positive change through education, entrepreneurship and empowering individuals.

Michael has built several successful businesses with exits ranging from Chatride, an encrypted peer-to-peer video conferencing technology, Ratemash, once one of the UK’s largest student social networks, the Wikileaks Android app and many niche mobile apps used by millions of users worldwide.

Alongside starting and growing businesses, Michael has advised and supported startups, investors and corporates in Asia, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. He was a finalist of the Thiel Fellowship by Peter Thiel and also awarded the Silver medal in the Mathematics Olympiad.

He is a fellow of the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin (Karl Schlecht charitable foundation) and holds the Lena-Weiss Fellowship of the Meckatzer Löwenbräu foundation.

Simon is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for impact investing and decentralized finance. He is a former personal assistant to the managing director at Commerzbank AG and worked for the Würth Group (IBB AG) as a private banking and CFO advisor. He is currently serving as a board member at Advanced Blockchain AG and recently joined the management team of CloudBackend AB as Chief Commercial Officer.

He is a fellow of the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin (Karl Schlecht charitable foundation) and holds the Lena-Weiss Fellowship of the Meckatzer Löwenbräu foundation.

Petar has worked as a full stack developer for more than 10 years at a time time when the internet and technology was in peak growth, and JavaScript was evolving, becoming more and more popular and used for many different purposes. During this time, he worked on projects both for big companies and startups and grew a sense of balance between developing speed and code quality. He setup software architecture and teams of young developers who he lead and mentored into becoming well-rounded and highly qualified engineers.

Eric is an American designer with a background in digital products and businesses. He translates complicated problems into smart and simple solutions.

He can tackle strategy and concept development, researching user and business needs, and designing elegant, easy-to-use solutions to meet those needs. He is a team player and can collaborate well with developers, clients, and other designers. He has taken companies like Amazon, 23andMe, Flipboard, HP, and Bayer from brief to launch and beyond.

Eric is ready to lead research and strategy, information architecture, and interaction design to create superb user experiences. He has the experience and skill necessary to ensure a great product—while leading teams to create better, more forward-thinking work.

Micah, previously the CTO and cofounder at Gooten, is presently involved in artificial intelligence research for NASA.

Wayne is a software engineer with two decades of experience. After working in both the telecommunications and insurance industries during the early part of his career the last ten years have been spent working in systems architecture and orchestration. He has spent that time as a Principal Engineer and Tech Lead working for companies such as Canonical, RedHat, and VMware.

Along with his breadth of technical knowledge and top tier software craftsmanship, he has a talent for building highly effective remote teams that ship. Wayne also has a proven track record of guiding and mentoring engineers through their early career progressions into senior and beyond.

At present, Wayne works from his home in Durham, North Carolina (USA) as the Tech Lead for the Octant project. An open-source developer platform that aims to help developers understand and troubleshoot their Kubernetes applications. In Durham he spends time on a seventeen acre property with his wife Jessa caring for their sixty chickens, eight ducks, three goats, two cats, and one dog.

Yao grew up in Ghana and is currently based in New York. He has a practical, real-world MBA from running an operations-heavy business and working as a software engineer at Octopus Investments, one of the largest asset management firms in Europe.

He was also based in Uganda for a while writing software to fight counterfeiting in pharmaceutical products at an award-winning healthcare startup whose clients include Sanofi, Marie Stopes, Abbott etc.

Yao enjoys riding bikes, hiking, swimming and exploring cities. He also enjoys a good bit geopolitics and macro-economic issues.

Ashoat is a software engineer who has spent his career working on social applications.

He started out maintaining open source forum mods in junior high. In college he wrote a browser extension that added a search bar to people’s Facebook profiles, which helped him nab an internship there. He was an early employee at Facebook, where he started and led efforts in 2011 to develop a search index for posts. His last role there was managing the Public Conversations team, which had a charter to improve the quality of public discourse on the site. He left the company in 2016.

Vlad is a researcher and engineer specializing in AI, optimization, and automation.

His passion for problem solving and programming led him to earn a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT, where he was a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and a top-20 scorer in the Putnam Mathematical Competition.

After college, he spent five years at Hudson River Trading (HRT), one of the world’s leading quantitative trading firms. His focus was quantitative research and development for US Equities and other asset classes, often borrowing concepts from deep learning and mathematical optimization to help build large-scale distributed systems and algorithmic trading strategies. He was most recently Head of HRT AI Labs.

In his spare time, Vlad loves participating in board sports like snowboarding and OneWheel, riding his motorcycle, and experiencing different cultures across the world.