Meet The Team Solving Phishing in Crypto
Chapter Two: The Malcolm & Harrison Story
Malcolm and Harrison are two kindred spirits who were fated to meet and start a blockchain company together.
It all began after a mutual friend introduced them and they made the decision to take an illuminating road trip to New Mexico together, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start with their individual stories first.
The Harrison Story:
Harrison, Indisputable Labs’ Director of Engineering, hails from a 5,000 person farm town just outside of Toronto, Canada. A nature lover, philosopher, and musician through and through, Harrison spent his growing up climbing trees, reading books and playing all sorts of instruments.
He had always planned for a career in music working as a high school music teacher, until he discovered the joy of math and computer science through making music with technology, pivoting his life direction. From there on out, he was hooked.
He attended the University of Toronto studying Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and a minor in Math. In his final year to take a break from statistical modeling, he took a course in video games and entered his game into a competition where he won the Microsoft People’s Choice Award for design, art, plot, and programming. This big win got him the interview for full-time employment with Zynga, where he landed in 2012.
At Zynga, Harrison worked on a variety of exciting projects including one particularly fascinating challenge within the Internationalization Team, creating a custom net-based profanity filter that would capture real time text and monitor players’ swearing in games across a multitude of languages including Turkish, Japanese, German, Arabic, and English among others.
After working full-time with Zynga, Harrison enjoyed taking time off to embark on a solo journey into the great unknown, leaving the U.S. to go live on a bus in New Zealand and enjoy all the sights and adventures.
After his travel break, Harrison returned back to the working world, taking a role at Pantheon where he stayed for four years working his way up from software engineer to Growth Engineering Team Lead, where he focused on business intelligence, revenue generation/recognition, system scalability, maintainability, and all the other fun things that make engineering a craft. Notably, Harrison made big waves in the fraud prevention efforts of the company.
Harrison really enjoyed Pantheon, and also yearned for a way to apply his skills for good in the fintech space. He started hearing about blockchain through the grapevine and the timing worked out magically such that he just so happened to get introduced to Malcolm right when this was top of mind.As soon as they met, they hit it off like gangbusters talking about everything under the sun. They chatted technology, finance, government, startups, the meaning of the universe, and of course blockchain… and the rest is history.
But how did Malcolm find his way to this fated meeting?
The Malcolm Story:
Malcolm, a cofounder of Indisputable Labs’ who heads up all things operational and financial, is a Bay Area native who has always had a deep interest in philosophy, impact investing and conscious business building.
An avid reader from an early age, Malcolm is a sponge for knowledge. After attending the small liberal arts school St. John’s College graduating with undergraduate degrees in Philosophy, History of Science/Mathematics, Classics and Comparative Literature, Malcolm went to get his MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School.
During his MBA program, Malcolm worked as a consultant for the Alliance for Climate Education pairing his passions for nature and sustainability with his skills in data processing and business operations to help the organization increase effectiveness. He then went on to become a StartingBloc social innovation fellow and mentor while also working as an impact investing analyst at Community Investment Management LLC learning the ins and outs of fintech.
Throughout all these experiences, Malcolm examined the structural barriers to change and the effects of social equality and inequality, wrapping his mind around how to create profit for something sustainable. He started playing around with alternative investments that benefit underserved communities.
Malcolm saw the most impactful companies were often the most capital-starved and wanted to create alternative methods of creating financial systems that could sustain meaningful businesses. But he didn’t find a solution until he was introduced to cryptocurrency and blockchain. Then the light bulb went off, he saw how this could be a solution, and he got obsessed! He’d never seen a technology that had the potential to create a systemic change of that magnitude.
This technology would shape company structures, political units, and the society at large. How could he contribute to the space?
Malcolm & Harrison Getting Into Coral:
Malcolm and Harrison met, had that seminal road trip to Taos, New Mexico where they listened to hours upon hours of podcasts and audiobooks about blockchain, and quickly started plotting their potential entrepreneurial endeavors. They came up with an organization called Good Vibes Ventures, a technology-enabled impact venture fund and advisory. They first started with renewable energy, underserved communities, and minority founders, but then found that the biggest way to make an impact was in blockchain and focused all their efforts there.
As fate would have it, Harrison and Jon Gillon (another co-founder of Indisputable Labs) were invited to be part of the same small Mastermind group — and while Harrison was ruminating on the struggles they were going through, Jon’s interest was piqued. He had to join. They all clicked immediately and Jon joined the venture.
Then Jon serendipitously ran into David on the street, a friend and past consultant of Jon’s previous company Roost. They had always talked about starting a business together and it was at this moment that each of them shared their current new ventures. Jon talked about his project Good Vibes Ventures with Malcolm and Harrison and David shared his concept behind Indisputable Labs. They decided to gather both teams for a crypto pasta dinner night and at that dinner, committed to participating in a hackathon together called the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition as Indisputable Labs.
They all had to come up with an idea and they decided to go with Canonical- an identity-based credit bureau on blockchain. They applied to Y Combinator with this idea and while they didn’t have product market fit with this particular concept, they stayed committed to working together as a team and pivoted to the amazing product that is now known as Coral Protocol- a powerful, anonymous address level trust protocol that is the flagship project of Indisputable Labs!
Flash forward to the present day, and David, Jon, Malcolm and Harrison are all still hard at work making this dream a reality alongside new team members who have joined in on their vision.
Malcolm is hard at work handling pretty much everything that isn’t engineering- from dealings with lawyers to human resources and finance to authoring thought leadership pieces.
Harrison is hard at work being a product owner and solutions architect, from handling backend, smart contracts, and DevOps to R&D and managing processes and systems for the team.
“I’m excited to work on something that is so challenging. We’re stretching the limits of what’s in the space and what we know. It isn’t just engineering at play here. It’s computer science, economics and game theory all in one.”
“There’s a lot of room for improvement in decentralized systems. To make decentralization happen for the common consumer, people need to feel there is security and accountability in blockchain and we are a part of normalizing the space for a lot of people by making it safer.”
Both Harrison and Malcolm embody the ethos of “leaving things better than when you found them” and this has undoubtedly been the case having these two extraordinary humans as major players of the team.
They have a lot in common from their musings on the nature of reality to their passion for nature and the great outdoors. They jokingly (and also not so jokingly) refer to themselves as brothers or platonic life partners and it’s a beautiful thing! We wouldn’t have it any other way here at Indisputable Labs — friends working with friends building projects that will hopefully change the world!
Random Facts About Harrison:
*Jazz trombone musician who toured around the East Coast — has 4 records on Spotify. Plays multiple instruments and sings
*Favorite fish/ sea creature: The Gnarwall
*Favorite hobbies: Hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, reading, kayaking, solo travel, camping, music festivals
*Favorite drink: Mezcal
*Very worldly human! Has lived in Japan, Thailand, Nepal, Bali, North Africa and South Africa, among others
*Most recent travel: Recently got back from doing a 3-week Everest base camp trek
Random Facts About Malcolm:
*Compulsive meditator from an early age (circa 1995.)
*Favorite spot: Marin Headlands
*Favorite food: Chocolate chip cookie
*Has 2 epic man buns, sometimes 3
*Company he’s excited about in the blockchain space currently: Aragon
