MY STORY: INTRODUCING MYSELF TO THE SUSHI COMMUNITY
My name is Jared Grey, and I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and I’ve always had great ambitions to make an impact on the world via entrepreneurship and technology.
I’m the oldest of four sons. My dad was an All-American football player at the University of Maryland who decided to become a medical professional. My mom was a professionally trained vocalist and also a pianist. My parents owned their own medical practice together, and growing up, I observed them running their own business as self-employed entrepreneurs. My parents taught me the value of integrity and hard work from an early age.
I also come from a long line of scientists and engineers, and I learned how to first program computers at the age of nine. I always wanted to make an impact on the world and while studying computer engineering I interned at Dell. At Dell, I fell in love with working in the tech industry and making an impact. During this time, I lived in my car in the YMCA parking lot to make ends meet.
In 2004, I started my own consultancy, and I helped build embedded systems and ended up closing several contracts with clients such as NASA, U.S. DoD, NOAA, U.S. Navy, etc.
I loved running my own business and was on track to achieving a reasonable amount of success. However, in 2012, I got sick and contracted a genetic disease that caused me to lose 100 pounds and forced me to be bedridden for a year. I had to learn to walk again while simultaneously running my own business. During this time, a college buddy of mine was working at Microsoft in R&D, and he reached out to me in 2013 and told me about Bitcoin. This was the first time I heard about Bitcoin.
In January 2016, another friend of mine told me I should become involved in crypto, and I read the Bitcoin whitepaper. I had been a lifetime libertarian and began contributing as an anonymous technical contributor to several blockchain projects.
In November of 2017, my friend, who had authored the whitepaper of a project called ALQO, asked me to join the project as CEO. I was excited to join as CEO of ALQO (now called EONS) because I wanted to make a legacy in crypto after consulting for various projects for many years. I wanted to improve people’s lives and gain leadership skills in my new role. I served as the CEO of ALQO for 3 years while serving as CEO of Bitfineon, an exchange that was the main project within the ALQO / EONS ecosystem.
After three years of serving as CEO of ALQO / EONS and Bitfineon, I was introduced to CBR, a crypto recruiting agency that approached me about the SushiSwap CEO role, and I fell in love with the Sushi team and community because of their highly entrepreneurial spirit and strong ambitions. I decided to run for election as Head Chef and was elected as Sushi Head Chef a few weeks ago in October.
All my life, I have adhered to my core values which are (1) Ethics, (2) Transparency, (3) Loyalty, (4) Hard Work / Meritocracy; these are the core values that have helped me reach this stage in my career and also helped me get elected as the Head Chef at Sushi.
I am now so honored to step into this role and am excited to further get acquainted with the Sushi community, garner feedback, and engage in a strategic planning session for Sushi 2.0. I firmly believe that Sushi will rise again as a top DeFi project. For this reason, I am extremely dedicated to doing anything I can to execute a turnaround strategy.
I would love to meet the Sushi community with a meet and greet Town Hall soon on Crowdcast and hope to answer additional community questions there and meet everyone in person. Please do not hesitate to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/jaredgrey and message me any suggestions you currently have about Sushi and the roadmap — I will try my very best to address each and every suggestion.
