Who’s the team building DecoNet?
Meet David Sneider & Chris Cassano
Deconet is a solution for technologists who believe in the principles of open source code and a modern creator-based economy, and who want to be paid for their work.
Creators can publish their code to Deconet, thereby enabling other developers to legally and easily license the work; when they do, these creators are rewarded with tokens for their contributions.
This is the ethical dilemma faced by many creators today: how do I contribute to technology in ways I believe in? And how do I avoid doing it for free or tying myself, and my intellectual property, to a particular company?
Enter Deconet, the brainchild of David Sneider and Chris Cassano, who have teamed up to find practical answers for the problems faced by creators and technologists everywhere — including themselves.
Meet the team:
David Sneider, Project Lead and CEO
David was born in New York City and raised in South Florida. His interest in technology started in earnest in high school when he read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil his junior year and thought to himself, “This is the trajectory of the future.”
This became the seed of his commitment to creating things that “make a dent in the universe.”
Before attending Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and going on to become a part of the founding team of Sendbloom, David took a year off to spend 200 days in the backcountry — including hiking from Maine to Georgia along the Appalachian Trail.
Tech and roughing it are philosophically connected in David’s mind — especially the connection between backpacking and working at a startup. Difficult days in both environments require raw persistence.
Building a business out of an idea requires the same kind of grit and rigor that you need to put on wet socks for another day on the trail.
David’s interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain is rooted in the ability to create new types of positive sum games. He brings his operational expertise and a deep understanding of customer needs and motivations to the Deconet team. He’s committed to reaching out, asking smart questions, and really getting to the heart of user’s problems.
Whatever he builds points toward solving real-life pain points. David emphasizes an important distinction, “I like to ensure a clear and strict delineation between activity and progress by biasing towards progress and calling out activity for activity’s sake for what it is.”
Chris Cassano, Tech Lead
Chris’s interest in open source technology started when he was only in middle school. “I read Stallman’s Free as in Freedom book when I was 12, and once wanted to get a Linux penguin tattoo because I just think open source philosophy is so cool.”
Chris’s journey as a full stack programmer has taken him from working for a defense contractor in Connecticut; to designing, building, and selling the first ever hardware Bitcoin wallet; to getting an intriguing email asking, “Do you want to meet to talk about a secret Bitcoin project?”
Of course, his answer was yes, which is how he ended up on the team at one of the most well funded cryptocurrency projects ever, 21.co (now Earn.com) before teaming up with David to create Deconet.
When Chris was 12 he learned his first ‘hack’: putting a button in a presentation and getting access to a previously locked computer program.
“I realized, ‘Oh my god, hacking is not what you think it is, it’s just knowing how everything works.’”
And it was this understanding and foresight that led him to become a Bitcoin early adopter in 2011. As he began to really understand how Bitcoin worked, he realized “This complicated amazing new thing called Bitcoin is just applied computer science, I know how this works; I fully understand this system and it’s really something new.”
Chris is a well-rounded developer who keeps a lot of breadth in his computing skills. He stays sharp on hardware, software, mobile apps, backend, frontend, and operating systems programming. He’s just really into the underlying mechanisms of products.
The founding of Deconet:
David and Chris met at an innovative ‘hacker house’ in San Francisco called 20 Mission. Their first project was a collaboration on a social app and mobile Ethereum infrastructure. While working on this project they realized a few things:
- Digital currency needs to be for a digital good. Digital currency for a physical good won’t be the first thing to have large-scale traction.
- A priority needs to be placed on creating something for the developer ecosystem, since they are the community that is already attuned to these developments and innovations.
- It’s easiest (and most useful) to solve an existing problem.
So why this the right combination of creators?
As David put it, “A lofty question deserves a lofty answer,” — so here goes:
It comes down to an empathetic understanding of the world around us, one that is not afraid to be flexible as the world changes.
David and Chris cite both their capacity to build good, usable products — as expressed in their past launches — coupled with a relentless pursuit to understand the world as it actually is. This pursuit informs their product process, which is a constant search to make the thing that can have the most impact.
Their views and processes are not static — they can’t be.
It really comes down to the future of work. As the notion of working at a particular company exclusively dissolves, Deconet is laying the groundwork for a world where people derive income from the value they are creating on a project basis, output and contribution is prioritized, and humans begin to have greater agency over our own lives.
David and Chris are committed to creating a product that provides value for the people that are already beginning to live this future and creator-focused mindset.
Join the movement below:
