Meet the CEO: Chad Arimura

Staring down the barrel at my 40th birthday next year, I’ve had a front row seat to some of the most life-changing innovations in history and have had the incredible opportunity (and luck) to build multiple companies that captured value along the way. We’re at the beginning of a new wave of innovation based on trust in a global but decentralized world, and that’s where my third startup, Etherprise, comes in. This post is about what led me here.

Trust was core to every single one of my startups, even the hobby that set the tone for my 20+ year career in tech leading me through my phases as developer, architect, CTO, and CEO. That hobby was a 3-node bulletin board system that I built and rebuilt. My BBS, The Sonic Realm, would perform callback verification. I would literally pick up the phone and call “premium” subscribers and ask them dumb questions (spoiler alert: the answer is Ansi Creators In Demand). That was my trust model, and it was about as complex as a 12-year-old could imagine. Faith was everything, stakes were low.

Trust was core to my first startup in college where I was the CTO of AllDorm, the college-everything superstore. We trusted hundreds of suppliers, thousands of university partnerships, and millions of potential college student customers. This trust model was managed by dozens of partnership team members, some lawyers, and some faith. Stakes were higher, but the tools available to us were rudimentary and evolving quickly.

Trust was core to my second startup, Iron.io, as hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprises trusted us with their critical compute workloads and sensitive code. We executed millions of core-compute-hours per day to deliver the news for CNN, perform genetic researching for Philips Healthcare, and deliver the right in-store deals to Whole Foods shoppers. Our globally-operating customers trusted us to do the right thing, and our business was built on the core values of reliability, honesty, and openness.

Through this journey, it’s become clear to me that bi-directional trust was at the foundation of every phase, and this trust was taken largely on faith. Faith that we would do the right thing, make the right decisions, protect what needed protecting, and ultimately uphold our commitment to our core values. Trust that our partners would do the same.

But the world is changing. We’re quickly approaching a time when all 7+ billion people are online. A time when money, possessions, identities, and even personalities are “digitized”. A new era when scandals, fraud, theft, and breaches of confidence are daily occurrences from some of the worlds most “trusted” companies. Today’s model for trust will not apply to the world of tomorrow. Faith is no longer an option, and the stakes are higher than ever.

Etherprise exists to shepherd the enterprises of today towards a new trust model. It is built as an enterprise-grade public blockchain protocol that is partially Ethereum-compatible, but builds in a native feature set that includes the privacy, security, and control enterprises need. It’s a network that each of my former companies could have relied on, allowing networks of suppliers, vendors, and partners to operate with immutable and verifiable datasets that are private to all but the parties that need to know.

And I’m extremely excited about Etherprise’s world-class team and advisory board that will help launch this protocol and build out the ecosystem of applications, partners, and enterprise users.

Stay tuned as we start to share details over the coming weeks.